What Is a QBJ File?
A .qbj file holds general journal entries: usually adjustments your accountant prepared in their own copy of your books. They are packaged so you can add them to your QuickBooks Desktop company file without either of you rekeying anything.
Published 9 August 2026 · 6 min read
The short answer
A .qbj file is a QuickBooks general journal entry file. It carries one or more journal entries, each with its own debit and credit lines, from whoever prepared them into a QuickBooks Desktop company file.
In practice it almost always arrives from an accountant. They post the adjustments in their copy of your books, send you a small file, and you add the entries to yours. Nobody retypes anything and nobody has to hand over the whole company file.
It is not a bank statement and has nothing to do with a `.qbo`, despite the names. A .qbo is a statement your bank publishes; a .qbj is bookkeeping your accountant wrote.
Who makes one, and why
Journal entries are how an accountant records the things ordinary bookkeeping does not: depreciation, accruals, corrections to a misposted transaction, reclassifying something filed to the wrong account at year end.
The awkward part has always been delivery. The entries have to end up in the client's file, and the two obvious routes are both bad. Send the whole company file back and forth and only one person can work at a time. Write the entries out and have the client rekey them, and you invite exactly the kind of error the entries were correcting.
A .qbj is the third route. It is small enough to email, it carries only the entries, and the client's file stays theirs the whole time.
How to open one
Save the file somewhere you can find it, open your company file, and use the import menu. There is no need to open the .qbj itself first. QuickBooks Desktop asks for it.
- On Windows, go to File → Utilities → Import → General Journal Entries.
- On Mac, go to File → Import → General Journal Entries.
- Select the
.qbjfile you saved. - The Add General Journal Entries window lists everything the file contains, so you can read the entries before committing to any of them.
- Choose Add GJEs, then OK.
That review window is the part worth slowing down for. It is the last point at which you can see what an entry does to which accounts before it is in your books. Journal entries are precisely the sort of thing that is tedious to unpick afterwards.
The QuickBooks file extensions, sorted out
QuickBooks Desktop uses a dozen extensions that all begin .qb, and a .qbj arriving by email is often the first time anyone looks closely at them. These are the ones you will actually meet.
| Extension | What it is |
|---|---|
| .qbw | The company file itself: the books you work in |
| .qbb | A backup of that company file |
| .qbm | A portable company file: compressed, for emailing |
| .qbx | An accountant's copy transfer file, sent by the client |
| .qba | The working file the accountant opens that transfer file as |
| .qby | The accountant's changes, sent back for the client to bring in |
| .qbj | General journal entries, as described on this page |
| .qbo | A bank statement in Web Connect format: unrelated to the rest |
The .qbx / .qba / .qby trio is a different arrangement from a .qbj and worth telling apart. That one divides the file between two people for a period, with restrictions on what each can change. A .qbj divides nothing: it is a one-way delivery of some entries, with no lock on your file and no period to close afterwards.
Why an accountant would choose it
Against the other ways of getting entries into QuickBooks Desktop, a .qbj has two properties that matter.
- It is not limited to bank and credit card accounts. A
.qbodescribes a bank statement, so it can only ever touch the account the statement came from. A journal entry can touch any account in the chart. - It carries as many debit and credit lines as an entry needs. A depreciation entry hitting four asset accounts and four expense accounts is one journal entry, not eight transactions.
The alternative for bulk work is IIF, which is the general-purpose QuickBooks Desktop interchange format and can carry transactions, lists and much else. IIF is more capable and much older; a .qbj is narrower and is what the software's own accountant workflow produces.
Desktop, not Online
The menu path above is a QuickBooks Desktop menu, and QuickBooks Online has no equivalent. Being a web application, it has no File → Utilities at all. If you are on QuickBooks Online and an accountant has sent you a .qbj, the file is not one your product reads.
That is the same wall people hit with IIF, and the way out is the same shape. Ask for the entries in a form your product does take, or have the accountant post them directly. An accountant with access to your QuickBooks Online company can enter journal entries in it without any file changing hands, which is usually the simplest answer.
What this site does and does not do with one
Plainly: nothing. This converter does not read .qbj files and does not write them. The format's internal structure is not publicly documented. Intuit's own developer forum carries an unanswered question asking what it is. Building a reader against guesswork would produce a tool that fails quietly on somebody's books.
This page exists because the question gets asked and deserves a straight answer, not because there is something to sell at the end of it. If what you actually have is a pile of bank transactions rather than journal entries, that is a different job and one this site does do. IIF is the QuickBooks Desktop route for it.
For bank transactions rather than journal entries: turn a statement CSV into an .iif file, in your browser, with the balances checked before you download anything.
Frequently asked questions
Can I open a QBJ file without QuickBooks? Not usefully. Unlike a .qif or an .iif, which are plain text you can read in any editor, a .qbj is not a format with public documentation, and there is no reliable third-party way to inspect one. If you need to know what is in it before adding it, the Add General Journal Entries window inside QuickBooks Desktop lists every entry before you commit.
Is a QBJ the same as a QBO file? No, and the similar names cause a lot of confusion. A `.qbo` is a bank statement in Intuit's Web Connect format, published by your bank. A .qbj holds journal entries written by a person, usually your accountant. They share a vendor and nothing else.
My accountant sent a QBJ but I use QuickBooks Online. What now? The .qbj route is a QuickBooks Desktop one and QuickBooks Online has no equivalent menu. The usual answer is that your accountant enters the adjustments directly in your QuickBooks Online company, which they can do if you have granted them access, and no file needs to change hands.
What is the difference between a QBJ and an accountant's copy? An accountant's copy, the .qbx, .qba and .qby trio, divides your company file between the two of you for a period. It restricts what each side can change while it is open. A .qbj divides nothing. It is a one-way delivery of some journal entries, with no lock on your file.
Can I convert a bank statement into a QBJ? Not here, and be wary of anything that claims to. A journal entry states which accounts both sides of a transaction belong to, and a bank statement does not contain that information. It would have to be invented. For getting bank transactions into QuickBooks Desktop, IIF is the format built for it.