Apple Card (Finally) Gains CSV Statement Export

First, I created two accounts in Banktivity7: (1) a credit card account for the purchases and (2) a cash back account.
The import involves two separate imports:
1 - Selecting the credit card account, File>Import Transactions
Select the fields Date, Description and Amount > Continue
2. Selecting the cash back account, File>Import Transactions
Select the fields Date, Description and the column without a heading > Continue

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That’s one thing that’s not an issue with the Apple Card.

Personally I have so few transactions that so far I just enter them manually. I keep the notifications on the phone until I’ve entered them. But having even CSV export, I won’t have to do that anymore - I’ll just import them at the end of the month. Fine with me.

On the other hand, there’s one benefit of “self-entering” - you can catch mistakes.

I track my charges with a spreadsheet. I hand-enter every charge from my printed receipts. I hold on to those slips of paper until my statement arrives, at which point I reconcile the two.

Most of the time there are no errors, but there have been a few occasions where the charge reported by the bank was different from the charge on my receipt. Usually because someone in a restaurant made a mistake (I assume it was a mistake) entering the tip.

If I relied entirely on data from the card company, I would never catch these mistakes. Since I don’t, I can spot them and get the matter fixed - usually by calling the merchant and talking with them, less frequently by contesting the charge.

I’m a long time user of Quicken and find it invaluable to combine account information from multiple banks and financial institutions. I’ve contacted both Apple Card Support and Quicken Support to request that the inability to import from Apple Card to Quicken be fixed. I found it interesting that Quicken can import CSV files from Mint.com but not Apple. Personally, I want the QFX format that automatically downloads to Quicken. Until this is done, I find no other recourse except stopping use of Apple Card. BTW, I appreciate finding all the information posted here. Thanks

Most do it the other way around to this, as it’s less data-entry effort and associated room for data-entry mistakes…

  1. Keep receipts / online order emails.
  2. Download the statement at month end (or even better, a regularly updated direct download function).
  3. Reconcile the receipts against the statement.

If using spreadsheets or an app-based system, step 2 may involve importing using a number format (CSV/OFX/QFX/etc.), instead of just manually reading a vanilla PDF digital-paper type statement.

But whatever works for oneself is fine. :slight_smile:


One thing that annoys me about Apple Pay, is that there is almost nothing like a receipts functionality. Apart from that last 10 transactions totals in the app settings per card, which is useless as it only has a TOTAL and no breakdown of what was bought, and given it’s only the last 10 transactions, anything after that and the info is gone forever.
EDIT: Of course Apple promote said non-breakdown or proper receipts system info as a privacy feature (“we don’t know what you bought” = your privacy). But reading between the lines, in reality this is obviously more about them not implementing a proper receipts feature, or not being able to, so instead spinning that into it being a privacy feature. :wink:

You go into many “digital payments only” places, and they don’t actually offer you ANY receipts anymore – they literally have no way of printing one off or emailing you one or anything (asking for one and they look at you funny sometimes too, lol: “What you want a…receipt…erm, why?” type attitude). So you’re left with either forgetting about it, or manually making your own note of the transaction.

This is becoming more and more common in restaurants and similar type of establishments, yet there seems to be nothing Apple or retailers are doing about this. After all, you have no recourse for mistakes if they never issue you with a receipt as proof of transaction and amounts, do you. And people who really need to track their outgoings intensively, business expenses at one end (where receipts are typically mandatory), and especially poorer folks at the other, aren’t helped by this either. Bad.

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For me, until Apple allows online access to Apple Card transactions (like every other card issuer out there), my use of their card will be extremely limited. For 6% back at Christmas, I was happy to enter the transactions by hand; other than that, it’s a non-starter. The CSV statement export is useless.

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Agree. Many of these “new banks” are offering only app-based solutions with no browser website to access at all.

Apart from having better views in browser, it ends-up as being just plain annoying if you are at a computer trying to do some accounting, having to login and stare at a tiny phone screen showing you say 100 transactions you’re trying to deal with.

Another of these overly simplistic “cool” things, in a vein attempt to appeal to da youngsters. As if they suddenly don’t need to track financials like anyone else. :roll_eyes:

I use Personal Capital. It ONLY accepts direct transfers from other financial service providers. It does not allow manual entries. One can set up a manual account, but all you can do is adjust balances. You cannot enter individual transactions.

When I spoke to Goldman Sachs about this problem with the Apple Card, I was told that Apple does not provide a web portal “at this time.”

I understand that there are rumors that Apple will begin to allow direct access (iMore: “According to Apple, though, OFX or Open Financial Exchange will be supported in the near future as well.”

I hope so as this predicament is keeping me from using the card although I really want to.

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I too only use Quicken file types to import into Moneydance. Sounds like the csv file isn’t a good solution. I’m unfamiliar with OFX, will that import better, more like a quicken file type?

My understanding is that OFX (Open File Exchange) files should import msmoothly, just as QFX files (also referred to as Quicken Web Connect files) do. I believe that QFX is a superset of the OFX format. My guess is that the major differences are structures for direct import over the Internet from the financial institution which you don’t use if you if you manually export from Apple and them import into Moneydance.

Near as I can tell, you now have to manually download the CC statement files from all the sites and import them manually. They all seem to have turned off the direct web importing.

I use Banktivity, but my answer would be the same if I was still using Quicken. I won’t bother getting an Apple Card until they support the export of transactions into these applications. CSV statement exports are a step in the right direction, but they’re not enough. I won’t get an Apple Card if it makes my financial/budgeting tasks more painstaking and time-consuming.

Apologies, I mis-remembered the steps for importing the cash account. Namely, the CSV file only includes Applecard activity - not cash back. So, in order to import the cash back transactions into my Apple cash account I save the PDF statement, open it with PDFPen and export as XLSX. Sheet 2 includes the cash transactions that can be imported

I never use O/QFX to download transactions as the financial institutions don’t have all the data I use. I tried it and spent MORE time editing the transactions than I did entering them correct manually. Once I enter them into my primary application, I then use QIF to get them into my secondary and tertiary applications.

I used the CSV file for importing the January statement into Moneydance and discovered a bug. The issue is that it is quite possible for a textual comma to appear inside a field. Apple does not use any substitution for it, and so, it causes the rest of that field to be interpreted as the next field and all subsequent fields to be moved right one field. This occurred in my file when there was address in the memo field.

Apple needs to encode or substitute for those commas so that they are not interpreted as field separators.

Hi,

I can import the CVS file, but charges are listed in the Payment column and payments show up in the Charge column in Moneydance? I see others here have successfully imported this Apple Card CVS file, how did you guys solve this issue?

Yes, this happened to me as well. I was surprised to see someone say that it worked in MoneyDance, as it definitely did not work for me.

What I did for last month was open the csv file in Excel, create a new amount column what was the existing amount times -1, and saved and imported that file. The only issue with csv import in MoneyDance is that it’s not like ofx or qfx import - you can’t match transactions to what is already in your register, so I had to delete a few that I had already entered.

I’m looking forward to ofx file export when it happens.

Thanks for your feedback, and I will be waiting for this feature too and will continue to manually enter my transactions.

FYI, I purchased the Mac App CVS2OFX, but cannot get it to create a file that imports correctly, so if anyone wanted to know if this app is worth its rather high cost, it is not.

Thanks

I did try this app as well, just yesterday, when I was struggling with this. It does work for me.

Before you open the csv file in the app, make sure the first time that the mappings field is set to [auto]. That should try to map the fields, and it does a pretty good job. For me it set Date to Transaction Date, amount to Amount / USD, Name to Merchant, Memo to Description, and the rest to Do not use. There is a button on the bottom “Change amount sign” that will flip the signs of all the amounts so that deposits and payments show up in the right fields. You can save the mapping to a name of your choice to use for next month.

I plan to purchase this app as I can use it for PayPal transaction import as well. It is costly but in the long run will be worth it for me.

I’m the guy who uses Moneydance. When importing the CSV file, I was presented with a dialog box to define the correspondence between the CSV field and Moneydance fields (with an Ignore option for fields not to be used). I chose the following correspondence:
Transaction Date -> Date
Clearing Date -> Ignore
Description -> Memo (this is where transaction details normally appear)
Merchant -> Description
Category -> Category
Type -> Ignore
Amount -> Debit Amount (this gets the signs right)

I then imported the file. I needed to correct the one entry that had a comma in the CSV file description and also change the category for every entry to ones I use in Moneydance. Hopefully, for future statements, Moneydance will recognize previously used merchants and change the category appropriately (it does that for QFX import) and manual entry).

In response to another comment, there is a Download PayPal Transactions extension available that works with the PayPal API (or you can load PayPal statements from CSV or QIF formats).

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