“My Canadian bank file will not import”
Canadian bank exports sit between the American and European conventions, which is exactly where importers get confused. Add French-language payee names and the two most common failures — dates and encoding — both become likely at once.
Symptoms
Accented payee names arrive as garbage Dates import a month out for part of the year A QFX download is refused as not a valid Web Connect file
What actually causes it
Accented characters in payee names
Québécois merchant names carry accents, and a mismatch between the file's encoding and its declared charset turns each one into two or three strange characters. The bytes are intact; the alphabet used to read them is wrong.
Mixed date conventions
Canadian institutions use ISO, day-first and month-first depending on the bank and the export. Accepting your software's default rather than matching the file is what makes some dates land a month away.
Format labels that name software rather than formats
Downloads described as Quicken or Money carry different identifiers. Picking the wrong one produces a file your software rejects on account grounds while the transactions inside are perfect.
How to fix it
- Drop the file into the fixer below: encoding mismatches, date shapes and structural defects are reported together.
- Set the date format explicitly during import; with mixed conventions the default is a coin toss.
- Prefer re-downloading over patching when accents are broken — a fresh export usually has consistent bytes and header.
- If your software rejects the file on account grounds, download the variant named after the program you actually use.
Related import problems
Skip the manual edit — fix it automatically
The fixer flags a header that declares ASCII while the content carries accents, which is the exact contradiction behind broken French payee names. Free, no signup, no upload.
Open the fixer