Fixing "QuickBooks is unable to verify the Financial Institution information for this download"

The usual causes, roughly in order of how often people report them:

• The bank changed its code. Banks occasionally move to a new Intuit ID, and files carrying the new number can be rejected until QuickBooks catches up. The best-known case: from late January 2019, users in Intuit's community reported Chase credit-card QBO downloads failing with this exact message after Chase's files started carrying a new INTU.BID. The workaround users shared was to edit the number in the file to an older, accepted code.
• The code is not allowed for this account type. Some codes are accepted for checking accounts but not credit cards, or the reverse.
• The account is already linked to a different bank. If the QuickBooks account was set up for online banking with one institution, a file labelled with another can be refused.
• QuickBooks is out of date, or past its service date. An old release may have an old copy of the institution list, and versions that Intuit no longer supports can lose bank-feed services.
• The file came from a converter that wrote a code QuickBooks does not accept.

Back up your company file before you start.

1. Import through the menu, not by double-clicking. In QuickBooks Desktop choose File → Utilities → Import → Web Connect Files and select the .qbo file. Choose to use an existing QuickBooks account and pick it yourself.
2. Update QuickBooks. Install the latest release for your version (Help → Update QuickBooks Desktop), restart, and import again. Check that your version is still supported for bank feeds.
3. Switch Bank Feeds to Classic mode. Intuit suggests this for Web Connect import problems: Edit → Preferences → Checking → Company Preferences, then the Bank Feeds options. Import the file again in Classic mode.
4. Check the account type. A credit-card statement must go into a credit-card account and a bank statement into a bank account. Importing into the wrong type is a common cause of rejection.
5. Remove the old online-banking link. If the account was previously connected to a different institution, deactivate its online services in the account's Bank Feed settings, then import the file and choose the account again. Note that this ends any live feed on that account.
6. Edit the bank code (next section), if nothing above worked.
7. Use another route. In QuickBooks Online, upload a CSV instead of the QBO file; CSV uploads need no bank code. Our guide to importing a PDF bank statement into QuickBooks covers the CSV layouts.

This is the fix most forum threads end with, and it works because the code is only a label: you still choose the destination account during the import.

1. Make a copy of the .qbo file and work on the copy.
2. Open it in a plain-text editor such as Notepad on Windows or TextEdit in plain-text mode on a Mac. Never open it in Word or Excel, which can change the file's layout and line endings and cause a different error ("We can't read the file").
3. Find the line that starts with <INTU.BID> and note the number after it.
4. Replace the number with a code QuickBooks accepts for your account type. Converter makers and forum answers commonly use 3000, the code in Wells Fargo's own Web Connect files, and ProperSoft's help says that code works for every account type. In the 2019 Chase threads, users reported success with 2430 for the affected card files.
5. If the file also has a <FID> line inside the <FI> block, users often set it to the same number so the two agree.
6. Save the file, keeping the .qbo extension and plain-text format, and import it through the menu as in step 1 above.

QuickBooks will probably show the institution named by the new code, for example Wells Fargo for 3000. That is a label on the file. Choose your own account, and do not set the account up for online banking with the institution QuickBooks names.

A QBO file made from a PDF has no bank code of its own, so the PDF to QBO converter writes 3000 in both INTU.BID and FID, matching a Wells Fargo-issued file we compared it with. Card and loan statements are written as credit-card accounts; everything else as checking. Imports of these files into QuickBooks itself have not yet been tested and recorded, so this guide does not claim they will be accepted in your version.

If one of our files gives this error, try the fixes above in order, then use the CSV route in QuickBooks Online. One purchase of a statement's paid pages already includes the CSV, QBO and other downloads, so switching formats costs nothing more for that result. When asking for help, send the exact error text and your QuickBooks version, not the statement or file.

• "Missing bid data." The file has no INTU.BID line. Download a fresh copy, or add the line as described above.
• "QuickBooks found an error. We can't read the file." The file was changed after download, often by a spreadsheet or word processor. Download it again and import it unopened.
• Duplicates after a successful import. QuickBooks skips transaction IDs it has already seen in Web Connect files, but transactions from a live bank feed have different IDs. Remove the overlapping dates before importing.

For the wider picture of which file each program needs, see QBO vs QFX vs OFX vs QIF.