“My Citibank export will not load into my accounting software”
Citibank exports differ between the card side and the banking side of the same login, and software that handles one often stumbles on the other. Knowing which side a file came from usually explains the failure faster than reading the error message does.
Symptoms
The card export has a different column layout from the checking export Dates or amounts land in the wrong fields after mapping Only a few months are available even though older statements are visible
What actually causes it
Card and bank exports use different layouts
The credit card download separates debits and credits into two columns, while the deposit account download uses a single signed amount. An import mapping saved for one produces reversed or empty amounts on the other, with no warning that the layout changed.
Transaction history is shorter than statement history
Statements going back years are available as PDFs, but the machine-readable export covers a much shorter window. The two are separate systems, and the longer one is deliberately not exportable as data.
Pending transactions are included in the download
Pending items have provisional amounts and no final posting date. Importing them creates entries that later change at the bank but not in your ledger, which shows up weeks afterwards as a reconciliation gap.
How to fix it
- Note which account type the file came from and re-check the column mapping when you switch between card and bank exports.
- Run the file through the checker below: it reports the separator and column structure, which is what tells the two layouts apart.
- Exclude pending transactions where the export offers the choice, and re-download after they post if it does not.
- For older history, export in the largest chunks the transaction screen allows and work backwards month by month.
Related import problems
Skip the manual edit — fix it automatically
The checker reports the file structure so you can see which layout you have before mapping columns rather than after importing. Free, no signup, no upload.
Open the fixer