“My categories did not survive the move”
Moving from one program to another usually brings the transactions and leaves the categorisation behind. That is not a defect in the export: category names are private to each program, and the formats used to move data were never designed to carry them.
Symptoms
Transactions arrive uncategorised in the new program Category names import as plain text with no structure Sub-categories flatten into single names
What actually causes it
Categories are not part of the interchange formats
OFX carries no category at all. QIF has a field for one, but it is a free-text name with no shared meaning between programs, so "Auto:Fuel" arrives as a string rather than as a category that exists.
Category hierarchies differ
Programs structure categories differently — some nested, some flat, some tag-based. There is no faithful translation between them, so something is lost whichever direction you move.
Rules do not travel
The renaming and categorisation rules that did the work in your old program stay there. Even with categories imported, nothing continues to apply them to new transactions.
How to fix it
- Export from the old program in QIF if it offers it — that at least carries category names as text, which OFX does not.
- Drop the file into the fixer below to confirm it is sound and see what it actually contains before you rely on it.
- Set up your category structure in the new program before importing, so incoming names have somewhere to land.
- Rebuild the rules for recurring payees first; they do most of the categorisation and take the least time to recreate.
Related import problems
Skip the manual edit — fix it automatically
The fixer is section-aware for QIF, so it shows category blocks separately from transactions — which tells you whether your categories are in the file at all. Free, no signup, no upload.
Open the fixer