What Is an OFX File?

The short answer

An .ofx file is a bank statement written in Open Financial Exchange, an open specification for moving financial data between banks and accounting software. It holds a list of transactions, the period they cover and a closing balance.

It is the format underneath the other two you will meet. A `.qbo` and a `.qfx` are both OFX documents with a handful of Intuit tags added; a plain .ofx is the same document without them, which is what software outside the Intuit family generally expects.

Three unrelated things are called OFX

Worth clearing up first, because searching the name returns all three and only one of them is a bank statement.

If your .ofx came out of video software rather than a bank, nothing on this site applies to it. Open it in a text editor: a banking OFX is readable text beginning with OFXHEADER or an XML declaration, and a plugin is compiled binary.

Two dialects that look nothing alike

This is the part that surprises people, and it is the source of most OFX confusion. The specification has two major versions, and they are not written in the same markup language at all.

OFX 1.x is SGML. Tags open and never close, and a value simply runs to the next angle bracket:

OFXHEADER:100
DATA:OFXSGML
VERSION:102

<STMTTRN>
  <DTPOSTED>20260105
  <TRNAMT>-24.50
  <NAME>COFFEE SHOP
</STMTTRN>

OFX 2.x is genuine XML. Same tag names, same meanings, properly closed, with an XML declaration in place of the colon-separated header:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?OFX OFXHEADER="200" VERSION="211"?>

<STMTTRN>
  <DTPOSTED>20260105</DTPOSTED>
  <TRNAMT>-24.50</TRNAMT>
  <NAME>COFFEE SHOP</NAME>
</STMTTRN>

Both are in circulation and both are correct. What matters practically is that an XML tool will reject a 1.x file as malformed, and it is not. It was never XML to begin with. Banks are conservative about this, and a great many still publish the older dialect.

OFX is a protocol as well as a file

The specification covers more than the document. It also defines a client-server conversation: requests and responses over HTTP, with authentication. That is what Direct Connect is, accounting software talking to a bank's OFX server and receiving the same markup back over the wire.

A downloaded .ofx file is the other half of the same idea. Rather than the software fetching the statement, the bank publishes it and you carry it across yourself. That is why the file and the connection carry identical contents and yet feel like entirely different products.

It also explains a common frustration: a bank can support OFX perfectly well and still offer you no file to download, because it implemented the protocol half and not the publishing half.

What QBO and QFX add to it

Very little, and all of it about origin rather than transactions. Both add an <FI> block naming the institution and an INTU.BID identifying it by a number registered with Intuit. Nothing about the dates, amounts or descriptions changes.

So the transaction grammar is shared by all three. What a QBO file is walks through it tag by tag: the dates, the amounts, and the transaction ids that decide what gets counted twice. That page is the reference for all of them.

What reads a plain OFX file

More than reads a .qbo, which is the practical argument for the format. Plain OFX carries no vendor tags. That makes it the version accounting software outside the Intuit family asks for by name, and the one least likely to be refused for describing an institution it does not recognise.

The trade is that it asserts nothing about where the statement came from. For some software that is exactly right, and for some it is a missing field. That is the whole reason three extensions exist for one document.

One practical note: because the three are the same document, they are routinely renamed into one another. Renaming changes nothing inside the file, so an .ofx renamed to .qbo still names no institution, and a .qbo renamed to .ofx still names one.

What an OFX cannot tell you

It is a statement rather than a set of books, so it carries no categories and no account assignments. A payee string and an amount is everything a transaction knows about itself; what it was *for* is added afterwards by whatever reads it.

It states one closing balance for the period rather than a running balance per row, which means a file that lost transactions from the middle is still internally consistent and still parses cleanly. Totalling every transaction and comparing that against the stated balance is the one check the format hands you, and it is worth doing every time.

And unlike a QIF, it does identify the account it describes. An OFX statement carries an account number and a routing or sort code in its <BANKACCTFROM> block. That is worth knowing before forwarding one.

Frequently asked questions

Is an OFX file the same as a QBO or a QFX? Almost. All three carry the same transaction grammar. A .qbo and a .qfx add an Intuit institution identifier that plain OFX leaves out. They differ from each other only in extension, and in which product that identifier is registered against.

Why does my XML editor say my OFX file is invalid? Because it is probably OFX 1.x, which is SGML rather than XML. Its tags open and never close, and a value runs to the next angle bracket. That is valid OFX and invalid XML at the same time. An OFX 2.x file will parse in an XML tool without complaint.

Is this the same OFX as ofx.com or the video plugin format? No, and neither is related to the other. OFX at ofx.com is an international payments company. OpenFX is a video effects plugin standard whose plugins also use a .ofx extension. This page is about Open Financial Exchange, a banking data specification, which is the only one of the three that produces a bank statement.

Can I rename an OFX file to QBO? You can rename it, but the rename changes nothing inside. The Intuit tags that distinguish a .qbo are written in the document, and a plain OFX does not contain them. What you get is a file with a .qbo name that still names no institution.

Can I open an OFX file in Excel? Not usefully. It is a markup document rather than a table, so a spreadsheet either refuses it or imports the tags as text alongside the figures you wanted. Converting it to a real spreadsheet first is the way round that.