An open standard XML-based format for exchanging financial data between institutions, software, and services. Supports bank statements, credit card statements, and investment data.
Understanding OFX (Open Financial Exchange)
OFX (Open Financial Exchange) is an open standard for exchanging financial data between financial institutions, accounting software, and other financial services. It supports bank statements, credit card statements, investment account data, bill presentment, and loan information.
OFX has two major versions: OFX 1.x uses SGML syntax (without closing tags), while OFX 2.x uses XML syntax (with proper opening and closing tags). Most banks still produce OFX 1.x files. The QBO format used by QuickBooks is essentially an OFX file with a few QuickBooks-specific headers.
An OFX file contains header information (version, encoding, security), a sign-on response, and one or more message sets containing the financial data. For bank statements, the data includes the account information, statement date range, and a list of individual transactions.
Why It Matters for Ecommerce
OFX is the industry standard format that most banks, credit unions, and financial software use to exchange transaction data. Understanding OFX is important because QBO files are based on OFX, and many bank downloads come in OFX format. PrimeConnect can convert between OFX, QBO, CSV, and IIF formats seamlessly.
Practical Example
You download your bank statement in OFX format from your bank's website. The file contains 3 months of transactions but QuickBooks can only import QBO files. Using PrimeConnect's OFX-to-QBO converter, you transform the file into QBO format with proper bank identification headers, then import it via Web Connect.
Related Terms
Open Financial Exchange (OFX)
The open standard specification (maintained by Intuit, Microsoft, and CheckFree) that defines the OFX and QBO file formats for exchanging financial data between institutions and software.
File FormatQBO (QuickBooks Online / Web Connect)
A variant of the OFX format used by QuickBooks to import bank transactions via Web Connect. Despite the name, QBO files work with both QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop.
File FormatSGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language)
A meta-language for defining markup languages, and the original basis for OFX 1.x file format (before OFX 2.x moved to XML). OFX 1.x files use SGML syntax without closing tags.
Related Tools
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