A budget app that imports your bank's OFX file

What OFX is, and which banks offer it

OFX (Open Financial Exchange) is a standard file format that banks use to pass transactions to finance software, with each entry's date, amount and description stored in fixed fields. Because the structure is the same everywhere, an OFX file from one bank reads the same way as one from another.

Downloads are most common at banks in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo all offer QFX or OFX downloads, and each has a guide here: [Chase](/chase), [Bank of America](/bank-of-america) and [Wells Fargo](/wells-fargo). At other banks it varies, and the quickest test is to open your own export menu and see what is listed.

Both generations of the format work: older OFX 1.x files (SGML-style text) and newer OFX 2.x files (XML) are both read.

How to find the OFX export at your bank

The exact wording differs from bank to bank, but the route is usually the same.

1. 1

   Open the account's transaction history

   Sign in on your bank's website and open the account whose activity you want.

2. 2

   Look for a download or export control

   It is typically near the list of transactions or on a statements page. Scan the format choices for "OFX", "Open Financial Exchange", "Quicken" or "QFX".

3. 3

   Pick the format and a date range

   Choose OFX and the period you want. A longer range is fine, and overlapping with an earlier download does no harm.

4. 4

   Upload the file as it is

   Do not open and re-save it in a spreadsheet. Upload the original file to Home Budget Analytics (up to 20 MB per file) and the format is detected without you choosing anything.

What happens when you upload it

The one requirement is that the file declares its currency. OFX files normally carry this in a field called CURDEF. If it is missing, the import is refused with a clear message instead of guessing, so no transactions end up filed under the wrong currency. If that happens, try another export from the same bank - a CSV lets you set the currency yourself on the mapping screen.

Once the file is accepted, each transaction is checked against what you have already imported. Entries with the same date, merchant, amount and currency are skipped, so re-uploading a statement or an overlapping date range is safe. By default the original file is deleted as soon as the import succeeds and only the extracted transactions stay; you can choose to keep originals in Settings. More on handling is on the [security page](/security).

What you see after the import

The transactions are not just stored, they feed the whole dashboard:

• Spending by category, with the categories coming from rules rather than AI: the first time a merchant appears you confirm a category, and that rule applies every time after
• Monthly trends, so you can compare this month with earlier ones
• Monthly category budgets showing the limit, the percentage used, a safe daily spend and a projected month-end figure
• Recurring payments and subscriptions detected from the history, with their cadence, next expected date and monthly or annual cost
• Savings goals in priority order with a projected completion date
• If your accounts hold different currencies, every amount keeps its original currency and is shown in the home currency you pick