Here is a carefully reasoned response from SEE Finance. Note that instead of implementing an xml format that no one uses or taking a purist attitude toward QIF, SEE Finance offers a more practical (and useful, I would argue) approach to interoperability.

--MB Begin forwarded message: >From: SEE Finance Support >Date: April 9, 2010 1:59:49 PM CDT >To: >Subject: Re: question about import formats Tumhi Ho Bandhu Sakha Tumhi Mp3 Download Cocktail. >>First, where is this debate occurring? We do chime in and or will track the debate as we like to clear up misinformation. >>Second, there are four options for importing data into SEE Finance: QIF, OFX, QFX, and CSV (a delimited format). There are also the Direct Connect method for downloads which uses OFX files. Early versions of OFX and QFX are not XML, but the new versions are XML compliant. QIF has been the long running standard for transferring financial information from institutions and from other software, but it has many short comings since it is about 30+ years old.

“Moneydance as a Quicken Replacement?” really makes myself. (due to importing Quicken files). Once I got my “rhythm” for the MoneyDance data.

Most notably no distinction to prevent duplicates and a lack of specifics for more advanced accounts and transactions (like bonds and options). QFX is actually a modified version of OFX, which was developed between Intuit (makers of Quicken) and Microsoft (MS Money) and a couple others. It is widely held as the new industry standard for retrieving information from institutions as it is the most detailed and uniquely identifies transactions to prevent duplicates and OFX is the files used for Direct Connect downloads.

MOH PC OpenBeta Client R3 582779 Installer there. Th e drawback to OFX/QFX files are the lack of category and split transaction information, which means the QIF file will continue to be needed until OFX/QFX is updated or a new format is developed. CSV files are great because users can actually create and edit them with their desired information using common spreadsheet programs. SEE Finance can export QIF and CSV files and we are working on OFX/QFX exporting, which will be available by the official 1.0 release this summer. >>Moneydance can import QIF, OFX, QFX and OFC files. OFC files are an obsolete file format originally created and used by Microsoft, but dropped in the late 1990's when they adopted the OFX format they developed with Intuit.

Moneydance does not support CSV files at all, but there is a plugin app to convert them to a format it can import. Moneydance can export QIF files and has a lot of issues in doing so.

As of last week, Moneydance was still incapable of exporting investment transactions using the proper QIF specifications. In the QIF specifications there is really only two different kinds of transactions: general transactions used for most accounts, and investment specific transactions with buy/sell details. Moneydance exports all transactions as general transactions and exporting investment accounts results in a complete loss of investment transaction details (no security information for the transaction at all. There is a few confirmations of this on a Quicken & Alt ernatives page at macintouch we track (it is lengthy, just scroll all the way to the bottom once it loads, someone commented on this on Mar.

Moneydance also provides three other formats, which are unspecified: their tab delimited format, their Moneydance XML format and their Moneydance 2008 format. The tab delimited file can be converted to a CSV file for importing into SEE Finance. These two later formats are essentially only useful for transferring information between Moneydance files and not for use for others since their specification is unknown.

Why they just can't implement the common QIF file specifications appropriately is incomprehensible. >>As for you next email about the comment: >>I'll bet the reason SEE Financial does such a great job importing Quicken's QIF data is that SEE Financial is highly tuned to compensate for the Quicken-specific quirks in the QIF data in addition to the quirks of the QIF format itself. I'd be willing to wager that SEE Financial won't do nearly as good a job importing QIF data from any other application.' >>>Yes, we are highly tuned for the quirks of the QIF format as it is the most common file used for transferring data between financial applications. Which means a lot of work has gone into the files created by different versions of Quicken in order to create an appropriate import experience for all new SEE Finance users.