IIF File QuickBooks Desktop: Purchase Order Import Format

An IIF file is a tab delimited text file, and it is the only built in way to import a purchase order into QuickBooks Desktop. A purchase order is not one row in that file. It is a block: one TRNS row that opens the transaction, one SPL row per item line, and an ENDTRNS row that closes it. Building it as a flat table is the single most common reason an IIF purchase order import fails or, worse, succeeds quietly with the wrong data.

Last updated August 2026.

This is a field level reference rather than a walkthrough. It covers what the row types mean, which columns a purchase order actually needs, the transaction type keyword, and the handful of failure modes that cost people the most time, including the ones QuickBooks does not warn you about.

What is an IIF file in QuickBooks?

IIF stands for Intuit Interchange Format. It is a plain text file with tab separated values that QuickBooks Desktop can read to create list records and transactions. Rows beginning with an exclamation mark are header rows that declare the column order, and the data rows that follow are matched to those columns by position. It is an old format, and it shows: there is no schema validation, no type checking, and very little error reporting.

Two properties matter more than anything else in this article. The first is that IIF is positional, so a column in the wrong place lands its value in the wrong field without complaint. The second is that IIF import does only limited error checking, which means a malformed file can import incorrectly and report no error at all.

What is the IIF file format for QuickBooks Desktop?

Every transaction in an IIF file is written as a block of three row types. The header rows are declared once at the top of the file, then each transaction repeats the pattern.

The header rows are the schema. If your !SPL header declares twelve columns, every SPL data row must supply twelve tab separated fields, even where several are empty. Trailing empty fields are the thing spreadsheet exports strip and IIF files need.

What does a purchase order look like in an IIF file?

Here is the shape of a two line purchase order. The gaps between values are single tab characters, not spaces, which is the detail that breaks most hand built files.

!TRNS	TRNSID	TRNSTYPE	DATE	ACCNT	NAME	AMOUNT	DOCNUM	MEMO
!SPL	SPLID	TRNSTYPE	DATE	ACCNT	NAME	AMOUNT	MEMO	QNTY	PRICE	INVITEM
!ENDTRNS
TRNS		PURCHORD	07/15/2026	Purchase Orders	Acme Supply Co	-1250.00	PO-4471	July restock
SPL		PURCHORD	07/15/2026	Purchase Orders	Acme Supply Co	900.00		60	15.00	Widget-A
SPL		PURCHORD	07/15/2026	Purchase Orders	Acme Supply Co	350.00		14	25.00	Widget-B
ENDTRNS

Three things in that block are worth reading closely. TRNSTYPE is PURCHORD, which is the keyword for a purchase order. The ACCNT value is the non posting Purchase Orders account, not an expense or inventory account. And the TRNS amount carries the opposite sign to the sum of the splits, which is the balancing rule IIF applies to every transaction type.

What fields does a purchase order need in an IIF file?

Intuit documents a long column list, but only a few are genuinely required. The rest are optional and safe to leave empty as long as the tab positions are preserved.

Why is a purchase order different from other IIF transactions?

Because a purchase order is non posting. It records an intent to buy, so it does not touch the general ledger, does not affect expenses, and does not change inventory quantities until you receive against it. QuickBooks tracks these in a dedicated non posting Purchase Orders account.

That is why an IIF purchase order points its ACCNT at Purchase Orders rather than at the expense or inventory asset account you might expect. People who copy an invoice or bill template and swap the TRNSTYPE usually get this wrong, and the result is a transaction that posts to the ledger and double counts the expense once the actual bill arrives.

How do I import an IIF file into QuickBooks Desktop?

Open the company file as the Admin user, switch to single user mode, then go to File, then Utilities, then Import, then IIF Files, and select your file. Newer QuickBooks Desktop versions route you through an improved importer that writes a log of rows it could not read, which is a real improvement over the older behavior of failing silently. Back up the company file first. There is no undo.

Import the supporting lists before the transactions. Vendors and items should exist as list records before any PURCHORD block references them, because the alternative is QuickBooks inventing them for you, which is the next section.

The five failures that cost the most time

These are ordered by how much cleanup they cause, not how often they happen.

The first one deserves emphasis because it is quiet and it compounds. An account created by an IIF import is a bank account, it appears on the balance sheet, and if a later import references the same misspelling it keeps using it. By the time anyone notices, several months of transactions may point at an account nobody meant to create.

Can I import an IIF file into QuickBooks Online?

No. IIF is a QuickBooks Desktop format and QuickBooks Online neither imports nor exports it. QuickBooks Online also has no native purchase order import of any kind, so a purchase order there is either keyed into the form by hand or created through the QuickBooks API by a third party app. Files that claim to convert IIF for QuickBooks Online are really converting it into something an app or the API can post.

This trips people up during a Desktop to Online migration, because the purchase orders are usually the records that do not come across. Open orders normally have to be re entered or recreated through an app.

Where do I get QuickBooks IIF file templates?

Intuit publishes an IIF import kit containing sample files and a header reference, and it is the right starting point because the samples show the exact column order QuickBooks expects. The more reliable trick is to build the template from your own company file: create one purchase order by hand in QuickBooks, export it to IIF, and use the resulting header rows as your template. That guarantees the account names, item names and column set match the file you are importing into.

Can an IIF import be undone?

There is no undo for an IIF import. QuickBooks does not group imported records into a reversible batch, so backing out a bad import means deleting the transactions one by one or restoring the backup you took before running it. Take the backup. On a batch of a few hundred purchase orders, restoring is minutes and manual deletion is an afternoon.

The safe pattern is to import two or three orders first, look at them in the Purchase Order form, confirm the vendor, dates, quantities and the item lines, and only then run the full batch.

Getting the purchase order data into IIF columns

The format is the easy half. The harder half is that the source purchase order is usually a PDF from a supplier or a customer, and someone has to turn it into the exact columns above. That is where the hours go, and it is also where the transcription errors that later look like import bugs are introduced.

Extracting the header and every line item first, then building the block structure from clean columns, removes most of the risk: quantities and prices are read once rather than retyped, and the line count can be checked against the document before anything reaches the company file. The QuickBooks purchase order import page covers the routes into Desktop and Online in full, and converting a purchase order PDF to Excel is the usual first step. Because IIF needs one row per item, accurate purchase order line item extraction is what makes the SPL rows reliable, and a migration backlog is faster through bulk purchase order upload. If the destination is a different system entirely, importing purchase orders to an ERP follows the same header and line pattern.

IIF is not the only legacy Intuit format that causes this kind of trouble. On the banking side the same era produced QIF, and getting an old Quicken export into a form QuickBooks will actually accept means converting the QIF file into a balanced QBO file rather than editing it by hand. Same lesson: these formats are positional and unforgiving, so generate them rather than typing them.

Frequently asked questions

What is the TRNSTYPE for a purchase order in IIF?

PURCHORD. It goes in the TRNSTYPE column on the TRNS row that opens the block, and it repeats on each SPL row inside that block. Using a different keyword, for example BILL or INVOICE, creates a posting transaction that hits the general ledger instead of a non posting purchase order.

Is an IIF file comma delimited or tab delimited?

Tab delimited. IIF uses a single tab character between fields, which is why saving one from Excel means choosing Text (Tab delimited) rather than CSV. Saving as CSV produces commas and QuickBooks will read the entire row as a single field, so the import either fails outright or creates a garbled record.

Can I edit an IIF file in Excel?

You can, but it is the main source of corrupted files. Excel strips trailing empty columns, reformats dates to its own locale, converts long numbers to scientific notation, and may add quotation marks on save. A plain text editor is safer. If you must use Excel, import as text, keep every column as Text, and save as Text (Tab delimited).

How many purchase orders can one IIF file contain?

There is no documented limit, and files with several thousand transactions import routinely. The practical constraint is error recovery rather than size: a single malformed block in a large file can be awkward to locate. Splitting a large migration into batches of a few hundred, with a backup between them, makes a bad batch cheap to roll back.

Why does my IIF file import but the purchase order does not appear?

Most often the transaction imported against the wrong account, so it exists but not as a purchase order. Check that TRNSTYPE is PURCHORD and that ACCNT is the non posting Purchase Orders account. Also confirm the vendor name matched an existing vendor, because a mismatch can file the order under a newly created name you are not looking at.