I have been having an issue with credit card data uploads… Some credit cards work others do not. In our company, we each have credit cards we use solely for the business and upload the data each month.
This month Tesco bank has removed the QIF upload option and now only allows you to get a full 3 month set of transactions in CSV format. Just to add insult to injury, they have also reversed the polarity of all transactions… so spending money on your card reduces your balance as it appears as a positive amount. Paying the credit card bill puts you further into debt!
MBNA went one further and did the same switch for QIF files… They rectified this after some arguing but now QuickFile is reporting a parsing error “Data at the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 1.” I have looked at the file and it looks exactly the same as all other QIF files… I can see no mistake. They do offer a CSV option, but it too has the polarity of transactions reversed.
I have raised the issue with both banks but there staff clearly do not understand double entry (which might be a bit worrying for a bank?) and have explained to me that credit cards are different from normal bank accounts and work in reverse… so they have the understanding level of a child!
Do I need to accept that someone will need to go through each downloaded file each month and check to see what each bank has decided to do each month and edit the CSV to make it usable… or is there some other way to sort the problem.
…and how do we get the numpties in the banks IT departments to at least find out what it is that they are sending to their customers…
I appreciate, this is not just a QuickFile issue and would probably apply to any financial software… but it is getting to be a real problem when each bank has its own standard and changes it on a whim!
I tried that… you can map the fields, but cannot change the polarity of the values… the banks are supplying only one column of values with plus and minus numbers… plus for a purchase and minus for a payment.
No… they are not!
…A purchase is always going to take money out of an account (bank, credit card, or where-ever) and add value to the relevant account (office supplies, travel, new toys…etc). A payment to a credit card takes money out of the bank and adds it to the credit card account. The only difference between a credit card account and a bank account is that one is always overdrawn (negative balance) and other should normally be positive!
Only thing you can do is speak to someone else at the bank higher up who can escalate the issue to someone who knows what they are doing.
But until then it probably wouldn’t be to hard to write an excel formula which splits the column in to two based on positive or negative amounts, then after strip the column of the minus symbol and you should be good to go.
You may find it easier to slightly amend the csv before trying to upload. If the in/out is all in one column then you’d just need to multiply this column by -1 to reverse the signs. You can then select ‘other’ from the list of banks and manually map the columns
Thanks Beth, that was exactly what I was doing… it is just getting very tiresome having to open all the various files to see what the banks are doing… and it seemingly changing without thought or care for what is being sent out…