Background banking, OFX, OFC and QIF
Microsoft Money supports two mechanisms of statement or data transfer between financial institutions and the Money program. These are typically known as Background (or 2-way) banking and Web (or 1-way) banking.
For the 2-way banking, Microsoft Money does the work for you. Microsoft Money communicates with the bank or financial institution in question and transfers the statement information for you. In US versions of Money 2005 or Money 2006, this can be supplemented with handling by Yodlee or CashEdge (account aggregation services). Versions of Money from 2002 onwards can use 2-way banking.
With 1-way banking, statement transfer is more manual. You will need to go to your bank's website and download the statement yourself. If your financial institution provides the ability to download, you will typically have certain formats to choose from (they may not be supported by all financial institutions).
A list of the three statement types is below:
- OFX [Open Financial eXchange] - This is the preferred standard (used by Money 98 onwards). This contains information which can uniquely identify transactions to stop multiple transactions appearing in your file. It supports multiple accounts per file, so you would only need one download from each financial institution. If you wish to use OFX with Money 98, you will need a patch (see Article 118).
Related pages:
- OFC [Open Financial Connectivity file] - this is like OFX, and is used in Money versions from 97 up to 2004 (See also Article 31). It only supports one account per file.
- QIF [Quicken Interchange Format] - this is supported by all versions of Money. There is no uniqueness, so the same transaction can be downloaded multiple times. It is used in the export and import of transactions from Money files though (See Article 28). QIF is not supported from Quicken 2005 onwards.
OFX is the preferred download format. More information on specifications can be found at
Article 373.
Keywords: OFC, OFX, QIF, statement