I now am able to write my own qif transactions and import them to a cash account. Two more questions though.
Is there a standard maximum number of characters defined for import in string fields such as M,A, and L? Empirically for an M field I tried 256 characters and it seems only the first 54 appeared in the register. No warning or error occurred. (I intend to catenate 3 Palm Pilot fields into the Memo field and thought it would accept more than 54 characters).
Somehow I was assuming if the same transaction is imported more than once, it would be ignored. That is not the case I observe. On one hand that makes sense, but when downloading from a bank, it then requires other software to determine which transactions to download. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. But is the behavior I see how it actually should work?
[btw, 4 digit years work in the D field, just as 2 digit years do, so I elected to code the 4 digits].
Well, there certainly are some limits, though they may not be consistent.
To the best of my knowledge, you can't have more than about 64 characters in a Quicken memo field. But that doesn't mean that a QIF file can't have more than 64 characters in a memo field ... maybe some other financial software product can make use of more than 64 characters.
And it isn't necessarily true that just because Quicken's memo field can take 64 characters when keyed in manually, that Quicken's QIF file import process will import 64 characters ... though it would be nice if it did. The QIF file import code was probably written long ago and Intuit might have expanded the size of the memo field later than that, but decided not to bother modifying the QIF import code.
[I think the OFX specs allow 265 characters in the memo field.]
Nearly the opposite.
When downloading using the OFX specs (Quicken "Direct" and "Web Connect" downloads), there is a unique Financial Institution Transaction ID for every transaction. Quicken saves that FITID in your Quicken file and uses it to make sure it doesn't process the same downloaded transaction twice (Quicken "ignores" transactions with FITID's that have already been downloaded).
No such ID is available for QIF files, so no way for Quicken to know what the transactions in a given import represent. To "compensate", Quicken's "matching" rules ("New" or "Match") for QIF file imports are more lax than those for OFX downloads/imports ... and no QIF file transactions are "ignored".
Yes.
That's what I'd do.
[Above all based on experience with Quicken for Windows.]
Aha. Thanks for all the helpful information. I'll just have to put in my own safeguards about not importing the same cash transfers from my Palm Pilot more than once. No big deal, just one more thing for me to invent.
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