Tablizer

What is QIF?

QIF is a plain text list of transactions, one field per line, each line beginning with a single letter that says which field it is. D is the date, T the amount, P the payee. A caret on its own line ends a transaction.

Who uses it

Quicken, and the long tail of banks and budgeting apps that still offer it because everything can read it.

Reading QIF

Each block up to a caret becomes a row. Split transactions, which QIF writes as repeated S, E and $ lines, are joined into single cells rather than being spread across as many columns as the most-split transaction in the file has parts. The account type from the !Type header is added as a column.

What it can hold

QIF is an accounting interchange format. A fixed set of single-letter fields per transaction, so only columns that map to them survive. A machine can read the table back out of it without guessing, which is what makes it safe to convert into and out of.

It keeps

It cannot express

What it looks like

Example QIF
!Type:Bank
D01/15'26
T-42.50
N1043
PGreenfield Grocers
MWeekly shop
LGroceries
CX
^
D01/16/2026
T1,850.00
PAcme Ltd
MJanuary salary
LIncome:Salary
^
D01/18/2026
T-9.99
PStreaming service
LEntertainment
^

Questions

Why are the dates in my QIF written oddly?

Quicken writes a two-digit year after an apostrophe, so 1/15'26 means the fifteenth of January 2026. Nothing else uses that convention. The year is expanded on import, but the day and month order is left exactly as the file had it, because QIF does not record which way round it is and guessing would be wrong half the time.

How do I open QIF files?

Any text editor will show you the contents. To read it as a table, paste it into the converter on this site and it appears in an editable grid. Nothing is uploaded.

Is QIF a good format for sharing data?

It depends who is receiving it. Quicken, and the long tail of banks and budgeting apps that still offer it because everything can read it. If the recipient is outside that group, a plain CSV travels further than anything else.

Convert QIF to something else