What IIF is
IIF is QuickBooks Desktop's import and export format: tab-separated, with several tables interleaved in one file. A line starting with an exclamation mark defines the columns for a record type, and the data lines that follow begin with that type's keyword.
QuickBooks Desktop users, and the bookkeepers who have to move data into and out of it.
What TSV is
TSV is CSV with tabs instead of commas. Because tabs almost never appear inside a value, quoting is rarely needed and the files are easier to read by eye.
Bioinformatics, log processing, and anyone who has copied a block of cells out of a spreadsheet: the clipboard format is TSV.
What changes when you convert IIF to TSV
The largest table in the file is used, which is almost always the transactions. A typical export holds TRNS rows for the transactions and SPL rows for their split lines; those are two tables, not one, and combining them would produce a column layout that fits neither.
Pick TSV over CSV when your values contain commas. Pasting the result straight into a spreadsheet fills the cells correctly with no import dialog.
What carries over from IIF to TSV
IIF records 2 things about a table that TSV has no way to hold.
IIF distinguishes a number from the text of a number; TSV does not, so every value arrives as text and has to be re-parsed by whatever reads it next.
TSV has no separate idea of a header, so the column names become an ordinary first row and nothing in the file marks them as different from the data.