Supported import formats

CSV, OFX, QFX, QIF, and GoCardless — what each looks like and which banks export which.

CSV

The most common bank export. Project Budget tries to auto-detect the shape, then lets you adjust the column mapping before commit.

Recognized shapes:

  • Chase — Transaction Date, Post Date, Description, Category, Type, Amount (signed amount).
  • Capital One — Transaction Date, Posted Date, Card No., Description, Category, Debit, Credit (split debit/credit).
  • Discover — Trans. Date, Post Date, Description, Amount, Category.
  • Mint — Date, Description, Original Description, Amount, Transaction Type, Category, Account Name, Labels, Notes.
  • Actual Budget — Date, Payee, Notes, Category, Amount.
  • Generic fallback — any CSV with columns matching date, payee/description/merchant, and either amount or debit+credit.

OFX / QFX

OpenFinancial Exchange. Most US banks expose this directly (Quicken-flavored as QFX). Project Budget parses both the SGML (1.x) and XML (2.x) variants and uses the FITID field for dedupe.

QIF

Quicken Interchange Format — old, but still common for personal-finance archives. Line-prefix parser (D for date, T for amount, P for payee, L for category).

GoCardless

European Bank Account Data CSV export with bookingDate, valueDate, debtorName, creditorName, remittanceInformation, amount, currency, transactionId. Project Budget picks the non-empty name as the payee and uses transactionId for dedupe.

Dedupe across all formats

Every importer skips rows it already has. The dedupe key is accountId + date + amount + payee, plus the bank-provided unique id (FITID or transactionId) when available. Re-running the same import is safe.