OFX - Open Financial Exchange
PumperNickel can read and write OFX bank statement format.
This format is commonly used to export bank statements from
online banking packages, such as ASB FastNet.
We have implemented this format in order to allow Prophet
(and other PumperNickel-accessible packages) to interact with other
software packages and banks. Generally this is
a one-off requirement for companies, when converting
packages, or reloading historical data. However with PumperNickel's scheduler and sender, it could be used for
routine transmission of data. It could for example be used
to export completed, reconciled bank statements out of
Prophet cashbook to a head office location. We are happy to
adapt PumperNickel to suit your requirements.
OFX bank statements are also readable by packages such as
MYOB, Quicken and Microsoft Money.
OFX is a freely available format, created and owned by
Microsoft, Intuit and CheckFree. It lacks the rigour and
carefully thought out detail of the XML recommendations from
W3C, as it is the work of far fewer people. It is much more
limited in it's scope, but it is widely available.
OFX covers a variety of business documents, although we
have only implemented the bank statement format at this
stage. We could extend to other formats on request.
Packages that support OFX often support QIF as well, which
is an older, and less well documented, Quicken format that
has been adopted widely as well.
As part of this development exercise, we also extracted
data directly from ASB Bank Gateway desktop banking
software. We used a special and expensive ODBC driver
from ITTIA for this. Although Gateway is now discontinued,
we are still able to access historical data from restored
backups without having the package running, configured or
installed.
Here's a sample bank statement OFX file created by
PumperNickel. Download here, you will find it
should load into any OFX reading bank reconciliation module.
It consists of a header, some account information, one
transaction (although usually there are many), and an
account balance at the end.
OFXHEADER:100
DATA:OFXSGML
VERSION:102
SECURITY:NONE
ENCODING:USASCII
CHARSET:1252
COMPRESSION:NONE
OLDFILEUID:NONE
NEWFILEUID:NONE
<OFX>
<SIGNONMSGSRSV1>
<SONRS>
<STATUS>
<CODE>0
<SEVERITY>INFO
</STATUS>
<DTSERVER>20040617200029
<LANGUAGE>ENG
</SONRS>
</SIGNONMSGSRSV1>
<BANKMSGSRSV1>
<STMTTRNRS>
<TRNUID>1001
<STATUS>
<CODE>0
<SEVERITY>INFO
</STATUS>
<STMTRS>
<CURDEF>NZD
<BANKACCTFROM>
<BANKID>12
<BRANCHID>3000
<ACCTID>0123456-00
<ACCTTYPE>CHECKING
</BANKACCTFROM>
<BANKTRANLIST>
<DTSTART>20040601
<DTEND>20040630
<STMTTRN>
<TRNTYPE>POS
<DTPOSTED>20040601
<TRNAMT>-67.28
<FITID>1143
<NAME>BP
<MEMO>WELLINGTON CITY
</STMTTRN>
</BANKTRANLIST>
<LEDGERBAL>
<BALAMT>0.00
<DTASOF>20040616
</LEDGERBAL>
<AVAILBAL>
<BALAMT>0.00
<DTASOF>20040617
</AVAILBAL>
</STMTRS>
</STMTTRNRS>
</BANKMSGSRSV1>
</OFX>
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Notes
We have saved a lot of time by integrating invoices electronically. We used to spend half the month entering invoices, and always be behind. Now we can focus on customer statisfaction, rather than administration. With the current state of the anti-trust trial and Lindows PCs being sold at Walmart, I can't see any possible future for a Microsoft dominated world. It was such a relief to get this software up and running. Our accounts team were straining at the volume of invoices to deal with. Now PumperNickel is loading 80% of them, we have more time for checking and follow up. | 
