How does QuickBooks handle IIF imports?

Posted by dwwilson66 on Super User See other posts from Super User or by dwwilson66
Published on 2012-05-13T14:43:26Z Indexed on 2012/06/05 4:43 UTC
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I've received a 'template' for an IIF file for Quickbooks transactions, and there's like seventy-bazillion fields in there, lots of which I never even user. It's a tab delimited file, with the following lines--field headers for transactions and respective splits for those transactions, followed by an end-of-transaction marker.

!TRNS FIELD1 FIELD2 FIELD3 ... FIELD48
!SPL  FIELD1 FIELD2 FIELD3 ... FIELD48
!ENDTRNS
TRNS FIELD1_DATA FIELD2_DATA FIELD3_DATA ... FIELD48_DATA
SPL  FIELD1_DATA FIELD2_DATA FIELD3_DATA ... FIELD48_DATA
ENDTRNS
...

What drives data to a particular field? Is it the field header with corresponding data, or is it the tabular position relative to the head of the line? E.G., Let's say all I have to import is the data in FIELD1, FIELD3 and FIELD5: Would I need

 by header:
 !TRNS FIELD1 FIELD3 FIELD5
 !SPL  FIELD1 FIELD3 FIELD5
 !ENDTRNS
 TRNS FIELD1 FIELD3 FIELD5
 SPL  FIELD1 FIELD3 FIELD5
 ENDTRNS

or

 by tabular position:
 !TRNS FIELD1 FIELD2 FIELD3 FIELD4 FIELD5
 !SPL  FIELD1 FIELD2 FIELD3 FIELD4 FIELD5
 !ENDTRNS
 TRNS FIELD1_DATA FIELD2_BLANK FIELD3_DATA FIELD4_BLANK FIELD5_DATA
 SPL  FIELD1_DATA FIELD2_BLANK FIELD3_DATA FIELD4_BLANK FIELD5_DATA
 ENDTRNS

Alternately, if it were a comma delimited input, would I need:

DATA1,DATA3,DATA5 

or

DATA1,,DATA3,,DATA5

Anyone have any experience with what Quickbooks is doing?

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