QIF Master makes it easier to enter banking, credit card, and investment transactions into Quicken. Many online banks and credit card companies allow you to download recent transactions (checks, deposits, credit card charges, etc.) into a file in the Quicken Interchange Format (QIF), so that you can import these transactions into your Quicken account. The problem with this approach is that typically the bank has no way of assigning meaningful categories to the transactions. So, if you care about categorizing your Quicken transactions, you must go through each transaction you have just imported in Quicken, and add categories. QIF Master automates this process.

QIF Master also handles investment transactions. Although recent versions of Quicken for the Macintosh have allowed investment transactions to be downloaded into Quicken, in many cases the downloads are incomplete and sometimes wrong. An alternative approach is to use QIF Master to extract QIF from your investment firm's transaction history web page and import that QIF into Quicken. Investment information is not produced in QIF format by the investment firms; to get QIF you must use QIF Master to convert the transactions on the web page into QIF.

QIF Master will also convert comma-separated value (CSV) files into QIF, and optionally produce its output as CSV or tab-separated values.