CSVQBO / Practical guide

Remove duplicate rows before QBO import without losing real payments

Understand exact-row removal and stable FITIDs, including the risk of identical legitimate transactions.

Separate repeated rows from repeated purchases

Two payments with the same date, description and amount can both be real. The optional deduplication setting only identifies an exact normalized triple. It has no access to bank reference evidence beyond your uploaded columns, so leave it off unless you have checked the repeated rows.

Inspect the reported count

The validation report records how many repeated rows were encountered and whether they were kept or removed. A synthetic deposit 2500.00 and repeated payment -125.50 yields two output rows with deduplication selected, three with it off. This is a generated test case, not a bank benchmark.

Understand the transaction ID boundary

FITIDs are derived from account/bank identifiers, normalized date, description, amount and the occurrence number of exact repeats. Re-exporting unchanged data with the same settings retains IDs. Changing a description, account identifier or date changes IDs; importer deduplication behavior remains outside our control.

Back up and review the destination

Before importing overlapping periods, make a backup or use a test company and check the application’s duplicate warnings. Review existing transactions by bank reference where available. CSVQBO does not connect to your ledger and cannot tell whether a row was already booked in it.

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Written by Zijian Xiao. Examples are synthetic. Review all extracted results against your original source file.