OFXCSV / Practical guide

OFX 1.x SGML and OFX 2.x XML: exporting both to Excel

Understand the two common OFX encodings and the data this converter retains.

Identify the header

OFX 1.x commonly begins with OFXHEADER and DATA:OFXSGML and leaves scalar tags unclosed. OFX 2.x uses XML with closed tags. A file extension alone does not identify the syntax. OFXCSV reads both for bank and credit-card statements and validates that statement containers are balanced.

Keep the encoding readable

UTF-8, BOM-marked UTF-16 and Windows-1252 inputs are supported. Encodings outside those patterns may fail or need a fresh bank export. Entity declarations and DTDs are rejected. Ordinary escaped ampersands and angle brackets in descriptions are decoded as text and escaped safely on spreadsheet export.

Preserve timestamps

The normalized date retains the calendar day written by the bank. A separate raw date field preserves the time and bracketed OFX timezone when supplied. The converter does not shift a transaction to a different day based on the server’s timezone. Balance timestamps are retained too.

Handle unsupported content explicitly

The tool supports bank and credit-card transactions, not investment statements, bill-pay requests or complete personal-finance backups. Monetary values must use the OFX dot-decimal convention. If a file mixes an investment statement with banking data, split the source first rather than losing part of it.

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Written by Zijian Xiao. Examples are synthetic. Review all extracted results against your original source file.