“The file will not import into Moneydance or Banktivity”
Short answer
Moneydance and Banktivity refuse files for the same reasons Quicken does: unescaped ampersands, malformed dates, missing declaration headers, truncated downloads, and semicolon-delimited CSV that arrives as a single column. Repair those defects, then work through the account matching step deliberately, because skipping it produces a successful import into nowhere that looks exactly like a rejected file.
Moneydance and Banktivity read the same formats as the bigger names, and they fail for the same underlying reasons. Because they are less common, forum answers are thin — but the defects are identical, and so is the repair.
Symptoms
The import assistant reports an unrecognised or invalid file The file imports with zero transactions and no error A file that works in another app is refused here
What actually causes it
Structural defects in the OFX
Unescaped ampersands, malformed dates, missing declaration headers and truncated downloads break these importers exactly as they break Quicken. The message differs; the cause does not.
CSV column expectations
Both apps ask you to map CSV columns, and both stop at a blank line or fail to split a semicolon-delimited file — so an unmapped-looking import is often a delimiter problem rather than a mapping mistake.
Account matching not completed
Skipping past the account selection step produces a successful import into nowhere, which looks identical to a rejected file from the register.
How to fix it: Moneydance
- Drop the file into the fixer below. Everything these apps enforce — escaping, headers, dates, ids, truncation, CSV delimiters — is checked and repaired here.
- Download the repaired file and run the import again, working through the account matching step deliberately.
- For CSV, confirm the delimiter first; a semicolon file mapped as if it were comma-delimited yields exactly one column.
- If the transaction list is still empty, widen the date range at the bank — the period may already have been imported.
Skip the manual edit — fix it automatically
The rules the fixer enforces are the format's own, not one app's, so a file that comes out clean here has no format-level reason to fail in either program. Free, no signup, no upload.
Open the fixer