[Novalug] Quicken .qdf format

[Jon LaBadie]

On Mon, Oct 05, 2009 at 05:15:48PM -0400, Nick Danger wrote:
> Jon LaBadie wrote:
> >All this talk of GnuCash and KmyMoney got me thinking
> >about my financial records.  They are in a nice ;)
> >proprietary format, several years worth of .qdf files.
> >
> >Sometimes it would be nice to be able to go into one
> >or a series of these backups and extract or chart some
> >of the records,  eg the downward trend of IRA's :( .
> >
> >When I've done a websearch, I've been unable to find any
> >tool other than Quicken itself that can parse these files
> >and extract any data.  And that would certainly be
> >tedious and not automated.
> >
> >Have I missed any programs or file layout descriptions
> >for Quicken's .qdf format?
> 
> I havent heard of .qdf. When I used quicken I saved things as .qif, 
> although I never ended up importing them. I just started a new account 
> when I moved to all Linux :-) Probably not an option for you though!
> 
> I know most will do .qif (Quiken Interchange Format or at least 
> Moneydance will. Do you still have access to any Quicken where you could 
> read in the .qdf and resave as .qif?

Just to clarify things.  I'm actively using Quicken; that's not a problem.
Its the primary reason I keep a copy of WinXP available in VirtualBox.

QIF format was used mostly for bank <-> quicken data transfer.  It has been
supplanted by QFX (Quicken Financial Exchange), but again mostly for transfers.

QDF (Quicken Data Format) is what Quicken uses when you ask it to make a
backup copy of its data.  There are several other files saved as well (eg.
.QEL, .QPH, .QSD, and .IDX files) but these are not critical and can be
recreated from the .QDF file.

I have over 100 of these backups covering about 5 years.  What I would like to
be able to do is extract data from them for ad hoc reports or charts, eg.
value of a stock holding over time.

As I have a working copy of Quicken, I could load an old backup and manually
record the data for that one time point.  But I've had bad experience doing this
and then returning to the most recent version.  Crazy things happen, like the
next time a financial institute is contacted, it tries to download all the
transactions between the old date and the current date.  Of course this is
a lot of duplicate data that must be deleted.

If I have to extract data in this manner (one date at at time), I'll create
another WinXP VM with a blank copy of Quicken.  But that would be tedious!

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon at jgcomp.com
 JG Computing
 12027 Creekbend Drive		(703) 787-0884
 Reston, VA  20194		(703) 787-0922 (fax)