“The downloaded file is 0 bytes”
A file that is zero bytes, or a couple of hundred, contains no transactions at all — and importers respond to that with the same generic errors they use for corrupt data, which sends people looking for damage that is not there.
Symptoms
The file size is 0 KB, or implausibly small for the period Opening it in a text editor shows nothing, or only a header The import fails immediately with no detail
What actually causes it
The session expired mid-download
Bank sessions time out aggressively. When one expires between clicking download and the file being generated, the browser saves whatever came back — frequently nothing at all, or a login page saved under a .ofx name.
The date range contained no activity
An export for a period with no transactions is legitimately near-empty. The file is correct; there is simply nothing in it.
The download was actually an error page
Some banks return an HTML error page with the requested filename. It looks like a statement in the folder listing and is refused by everything that tries to read it.
How to fix it
- Check the file size first. Zero bytes needs no diagnosis — download again.
- Drop it into the fixer below: it identifies the real format from the content, so it will tell you plainly if you saved a web page instead of a statement.
- Log into the bank fresh and download immediately rather than leaving the page open, which avoids the session timeout.
- Widen the date range to confirm the period genuinely had activity before assuming the export is broken.
Related import problems
Skip the manual edit — fix it automatically
The fixer distinguishes an empty statement from a saved error page — they look identical in a folder and need completely different fixes. Free, no signup, no upload.
Open the fixer