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Specifications of Intuit's .QFX Format?
mad.frog asks: "I recently upgraded my ancient version of Quicken to the latest (Macintosh) version, with the intention of being able to download my credit card transactions directly from my bank into Quicken, rather than entering all that stuff by hand. As it turns out, almost no banks support doing this for non-Windows platforms (not surprisingly, Intuit doesn't point this out on the package). But here's the weird part: the information downloaded is just an xml-like text file (.QFX). Anyone know how (or why) they would make such a generic file platform-specific -- what business advantage does Intuit (or my bank) have in restricting how I use this information? Also, does anyone happen to know details of this (apparently undocumented, Intuit-specific) format so that I can hack mine into submission and use this data anyway, even if it's not on my bank's Platform Of Choice?"
It may well suck, but decisions that come down to money often do.
Interesting that you put it that way, because my decision when it came to my money was to use a bank that supports my platform. I use linux exclusively at work for reasons that are obvious if you look at my e-mail address. Fleet (BankBoston back in the day) has the best online banking software, and best of all, they support Mozilla on Linux and they supported Netscape 4.x on linux when that was standard. Their tech support answers the phone, and they are responsive to bug reports. I've sent in two bug reports, and they were both fixed within 48 hours. I've heard that they are similarly helpful for Mac users (and a quick check shows their software working correctly on my Mac). If Citibank won't support you, I recommend Fleet. As a bonus if you keep a large minimum balance, they have no fees and competitive interest rates to go along with their open-minded platform support policy.
Sucks for all those other banks that I looked into that turn away customers with large balances because they can't invest minimal effort in standards compliance.
I've written the software to generate the QFX file and transmit it to the client system. As long as your browser has been configured correctly for the MIME type (application/vnd.intu.QFX), your browser should be able to pipe the data to Quicken. It sounds like your bank either did not set the MIME type in the script, or your browser didn't have the appropriate entries to pass data of that type to Quicken.
QFX (really OFX) is platform independent. The tech rep was lying to you.
I know it is.
You know it is.
Evidentially, the banks (and Intuit) are the only ones that think different.
This is not a question of MIME types. Quicken read the file fine. During its import, it takes the bank info and check to see if the bank "supports" macs.
If, according to Intuits database, the bank does not support Macs, the import is killed with an error. If the bank does support Macs, the import is allowed to continue.
Imagine you had a Apex DVD player and a Sony TV connected via standard S-Video cables. An analogous situation would be the DVD player turning off its S-Video out because it doesn't "support" Sony. This would be rediculous - S-Video is S-Video.
By the same token, QFX is QFX and it should not matter where the file comes from, Quicken should be able to import the file WITHOUT checking that the bank "supports" macs and certainly WITHOUT going online.