In the US, OFX (official website, Wikipedia) is the most widely-supported mechanism made available to customers of financial institutions (FIs) to quickly import transactions and account balances. There are two ways to import transactions (your FI may support one, both, or neither): one where the customer downloads a .ofx file from the FI and then imports it into their accounting software of choice, and one where the user provides accounting software with their login credentials and the software negotiates the download on their behalf. MoneyGo supports both import methods with the help of the ofxgo project.
To import an OFX file you have already downloaded from your FI, click the 'Import' button after selecting the account you want to import transactions to, select 'OFX/QFX File' as the Import Type, and upload the OFX file.
To import OFX transactions directly from the FI, instead select 'OFX' as the Import Type and enter your password and the date range of transactions you want to import. Note that there are a number of connections details that you will need to fill out before this will work (see below).
The most tedious part is entering the OFX connection details for your FI into the 'Sync (OFX)' tab when editing the MoneyGo account for which you wish to import transactions.
In my experience, FI's are not traditionally helpful when customers attempt to connect to their OFX servers using accounting software other than the single most popular one (though I encourage you to contact them to solicit this information if for no other reason than to remind them that there is more than one developer of consumer accounting software). Instead, we have to rely on community efforts to piece together the connection details. Here are the sources I've found most helpful:
- https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/OFX_Direct_Connect_Bank_Settings
- http://ofxhome.com/
- https://ofxblog.wordpress.com/ (this contains the most out-of-date information, but may possibly be helpful if you can't find your FI at the other two sites)
The following are the fields that make up the OFX connection details that MoneyGo needs to know in order to successfully import transactions from your FI.
OFX URL: This is the URL that MoneyGo/ofxgo should make their initial requests against. This is called 'Server URL' in the Gnucash wiki above, and FI Url at ofxhome.
ORG and FI: These are sometimes seemingly-meaningless strings or numbers that identify your particular financial institution from others which may share the same URL. They are called 'FI Org' and 'FI Id' at ofxhome.
Username: This is your username, usually the same username you use to login to your bank's website.
Bank ID: This is another identifier, specific to bank accounts (i.e. not credit cards or investment accounts). It is frequently empty, or sometimes is your bank's routing number or some other string.
Account ID: This is specific to your account, and is frequently your account number.
Account Type: The type of account (i.e. 'Checking' or 'Savings')
The following fields may or may not be required. Some of them are are to work around incompatibilities with FI's OFX implementations, set the OFX version spoken to something other than the default, or provide additional required information.
Client UID: This is required by some banks (Chase) as a sort of two-factor
authentication. You may have to generate this yourself (using uuidgen on Linux
machines), and then some type of out-of-band approval/authentication to your FI
after you try to download transactions using OFX in MoneyGo for the first time.
App ID: This is supposed to identify the application making the OFX requests. ofxgo defaults to its own string if this is empty, but some FI's require this to be a particular string in order to return valid results (frequently 'QWIN')
App Version: The application version supposedly being used make the OFX requests. Like they do for the 'App ID', you may have to set this to a particular value to make your FI's server happy.
OFX Version: This defaults to "203" (for version 2.0.3 of the OFX spec) if left empty. It must be one of "102", "103", "151", "160", "200", "201", "202", "203", "210", "211", "220" if specified. This controls what version of OFX is used to talk with the server.
Don't indent OFX request files: This is unchecked by default. Though rare, some FI's implementations break if the SGML/XML elements are indented (and others' break if they aren't!).