“My old Money QIF file will not import anywhere”
Files exported from Microsoft Money and other discontinued programs carry conventions from an era when QIF was written loosely. Modern importers are stricter, so a file that worked perfectly in 2008 can be refused today for reasons that have nothing to do with your data.
Symptoms
The import assistant finds no transactions in a file that clearly contains them Only the first block of transactions imports and the rest is ignored Dates come through decades wrong, or not at all
What actually causes it
Two-digit years
Legacy QIF wrote years as 98 or 04, sometimes with an apostrophe as in 3/4'04. Importers that assume four digits either reject those lines or place them in the wrong century.
Missing or non-standard type headers
Files exported per-account often omit the !Type declaration, or use a label modern software does not recognise. Without a section it recognises, an importer reads zero transactions and reports no error.
Category and account blocks mixed with transactions
Money exported category lists and account definitions in the same file. Importers that do not skip those blocks either fail on them or count their lines as transactions.
How to fix it
- Drop the .qif into the fixer below. It is section-aware, so it reports transactions separately from category and account blocks and repairs missing type headers and record separators.
- Import the repaired file and choose the date format carefully — with two-digit years the century is a guess your software makes, and picking the wrong one is silent.
- Import one account at a time; a single combined file is where most of these failures start.
- Spot-check the oldest and newest transactions after import, which is where century errors show up first.
Related import problems
Skip the manual edit — fix it automatically
The fixer counts only real transaction records, so a legacy file padded with category blocks reports an honest number rather than an inflated one. Free, no signup, no upload.
Open the fixer