Quicken to Monarch Money: Convert Quicken QIF to a Monarch Money Import CSV

Yes, your transaction history moves over, but the Quicken data file itself does not. Monarch cannot open a .QDF. You export the transactions out of Quicken into a portable file, turn that file into CSV, and upload the CSV to the matching Monarch account. Balances, budgets and reports in Monarch then build on top of that imported history.

No. Monarch's manual import accepts CSV, and there is no QIF or QFX upload in the app. Quicken Classic's cleanest export is QIF, so most people leaving Quicken end up with a file Monarch will not read. Converting the QIF to CSV solves it in one step and keeps every transaction, including the ones from accounts you closed years ago.

In Quicken Classic for Windows, open the account register, then choose File, File Export, and QIF File. Pick the account, set the date range as far back as you want to keep, and tick transactions. Export one account at a time so each file maps to one Monarch account. Save the .qif somewhere you can find it, then bring it to the converter above.

No. Quicken for Mac dropped QIF export after Quicken Mac 2007. On a Mac you export a register or a report to CSV instead, which works but arrives in report shape: title rows, subtotals, and sometimes split lines under each transaction. Delete those extra rows before you upload, or run the file through a spreadsheet first so every row is one transaction.

Upload the .qif to the converter at the top of this page, check the parsed dates, payees and amounts in the preview, and download the CSV. The output is three columns, Date, Description and Amount, with one row per transaction and no report headers or subtotal rows. That is the shape Monarch's importer expects, so there is nothing to clean up afterward.

Monarch's importer looks for a date, an amount, and an account, and it detects them by header keyword rather than by column order. Category, tags, notes and merchant columns are optional and get mapped automatically when present. Anything Monarch does not recognize is ignored, so extra columns in your file are harmless.

The converter gives you Date, Description and Amount. Monarch reads Description as the merchant or original statement text. For the account requirement you have two clean options: upload the CSV from inside the specific Monarch account, so the account is already implied, or add one more column called Account and fill it with the Monarch account name on every row. The second option is the faster one if you are importing several Quicken accounts in a session.

Put credits and debits in the same column and let the sign do the work. Monarch treats positive numbers as income and negative numbers as expenses, so a $58.12 purchase belongs in the file as -58.12 or as (58.12). Keep the converter's default single Amount column and skip the split debit and credit option, because two separate columns is exactly the layout Monarch's importer cannot map.

Any standard US date format works, so 12/01/26 and December 1, 2026 both import correctly. This is one of the quiet reasons to convert rather than hand edit a QIF: raw QIF files never declare whether 03/04/2026 means March 4 or April 3, and Quicken files written years apart often disagree. The converter resolves the dates once, consistently, across the whole file.

In Monarch, open the account you want the history to land in, use the account's manual import option, and upload the CSV. Monarch shows you the columns it detected so you can confirm the mapping before committing. Import one account at a time and check the resulting balance against the closing balance in Quicken before you move to the next file.

Yes, and this is the main reason to bother with files at all. A live bank connection in Monarch typically backfills only a few months of activity, so anything older has to arrive by upload. Your Quicken file is usually the only place that history still exists in one piece, which makes the QIF export worth doing carefully before you cancel the subscription.

You can, and on a Mac it is the only route. On Windows the QIF path is usually less work. Quicken's CSV comes out of the report engine, so it carries report titles, grouping rows, subtotals and occasionally a separate line for each split, and every one of those rows has to go before Monarch will read the file cleanly. A QIF is a plain transaction dump, which converts to a flat CSV with nothing to strip out.

Transactions, dates, payees, memos and amounts move. Attachments, reminders, scheduled bills, saved reports, budgets and your Quicken category tree do not, because they live inside the .QDF in a format nothing else reads. Monarch has its own categories and rules, so plan to spend a little time recategorizing once the history is in rather than trying to recreate the old structure exactly.

Not in the detail Quicken keeps. Monarch tracks investment account balances and holdings, but it is not built to store share lots, cost basis history and every buy, sell and dividend the way Quicken Premier does. If tax lot history matters to you, export those investment registers to CSV or Excel and archive them separately before the subscription lapses.

It depends on whether the money is personal or business. Monarch is a personal finance and budgeting app, so it suits households, and its annual plan runs around $99.99 at list price against roughly $83.88 a year for Quicken Classic Deluxe. If you are tracking a business, invoicing clients or handing books to an accountant at year end, you want QuickBooks instead, and the file route there is converting the same QIF export to a QBO file. Landlords sit in the middle and often end up on the business side. If you have not settled the question yet, the head to head on Monarch Money versus Quicken compares price, investment tracking and what happens to your data when you cancel.

Yes, and it is the safer sequence. Run both for a month, import the history into Monarch, and confirm the balances and categories look right before you let the Quicken subscription lapse. Quicken's Data Access Guarantee keeps Deluxe and higher able to view, edit and export your file after expiry, but Starter drops to read only, so export what you need while the subscription is still active.

Quicken Classic advertises Deluxe at $6.99 a month, Premier at $7.99 and Business and Personal at $10.99, all billed annually, which works out to roughly $83.88, $95.88 and $131.88 for a year. The number that changes the decision is in the fine print, re-read on August 30, 2026: those are 40 percent promotional rates that apply "for the first year only when you order directly from Quicken," and the membership then "will automatically renew at the then-current rates." Quicken does not publish what that renewal rate is.

That is worth weighing against Monarch, which lists $99.99 a year or $14.99 a month for its core plan and does not run a first year discount that expires into an unpublished number. Monarch is not obviously cheaper in year one, and it is not free, but the price you agree to is the price you can plan around. If your objection is subscriptions in general rather than Quicken specifically, the desktop buy once options are a different answer entirely: Moneyspire vs Quicken compares a $59.99 permanent license against Quicken's renewal cycle.

Move to Monarch if what you track is a household: budgets, net worth, shared logins and goals. Move to QuickBooks Online if any part of the ledger is a business, a rental or anything that ends up on a Schedule C or E. Monarch is a personal finance app and does not produce the reports an accountant or the IRS expects from a business, and no plan changes that.