Home › Comparisons › CSV vs OFX vs QBO: bank file formats compared
Three formats move bank transactions between systems. They differ in structure, in what software accepts them, and in how much protection they carry against duplicates.
CSV is the oldest and simplest: rows of plain text. OFX (Open Financial Exchange) is the structured standard banks use to deliver transactions to software, with typed fields and per-transaction IDs. QBO is Intuit's Web Connect flavour of OFX, tuned for QuickBooks. Choosing between them is mostly about what the destination software accepts and whether you need duplicate protection.
Statement PDFs convert into any of these worlds, but not identically: the converter's CSV exports are ready-made for the importers that take CSV, while OFX/QBO workflows start from the same verified transaction data and add the format's structure on top.
Best for: Universal fallback: imports into QuickBooks Online (3-column), Xero (4 named columns), spreadsheets and scripts.
Watch out: No transaction IDs, so imports cannot self-deduplicate; overlapping files create duplicates.
Best for: Software-to-software exchange: Quicken, QuickBooks Desktop and many banking tools read OFX natively.
Watch out: Not human-editable in practice; a malformed OFX file fails whole, not gracefully.
Best for: QuickBooks Desktop bank feeds, and QuickBooks Online file upload where offered.
Watch out: Bank-specific variants exist; a QBO generated for one bank's settings may need the right institution fields for another.
Practical rule: if your software offers a live bank feed or a bank-generated OFX/QBO download for the period you need, use it — first-party data beats converted data. Conversion earns its place for the history feeds cannot reach and the PDFs clients hand you, and there the destination decides the format: CSV layouts for Online and Xero, QBO-oriented workflows for Desktop.
In every case the pre-step is identical: extract the transactions and reconcile them against the statement before any format wraps them.
For machine exchange, yes — structure and IDs help software. For human review and universal compatibility, CSV wins. They solve different problems.
A QBO file is structured OFX data with specific headers and per-transaction records, not delimited text. Renaming changes nothing the importer reads.
Where the statement prints opening and closing (or running) balances, the converter adds up the extracted transactions and compares the result with the statement itself. If the numbers do not tie, the conversion is flagged and the mismatched rows are marked — a failed check is never shown as a success.
No. Uploaded files and generated exports are stored only briefly to complete the download and are automatically deleted within 15 minutes.
PDF vs CSV vs Excel for bookkeeping · Manual entry vs a statement converter · Bank feeds vs statement conversion · OCR vs digital PDF conversion · How the reconciliation check works
Your first conversion is free — no card, no sign-up — and every result is reconciled against the statement itself before you download it.