QuickBooks imported every date as 01/01/1970
There are two versions of this problem and the second one is far more dangerous. In the first, every transaction lands dated 01/01/1970 and you notice immediately. In the second, the dates look perfectly reasonable but the day and month have been swapped, and nothing warns you at all.
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Why 01/01/1970 appears
That date is not random. 1970-01-01 is the zero point of Unix time, so it is what you get when software is handed a date it cannot parse and falls back to "no date at all". When QuickBooks cannot read the date column in your CSV, every row gets that value.
A user reported exactly this on Intuit's community forum, and a QuickBooks Team member answered. The recommended fix was to exclude the imported transactions, correct the dates in the source file, and import again; alternatively, to turn on the editable-date option (the gear icon, then Other preferences, then Make date field editable) and fix each transaction by hand.
"All transaction dates displayed as 01/01/1970 instead of the correct dates."
— the reported symptom in Bank transaction import brought wrong dates, QuickBooks Community
Note what the fix requires: going back to the source file and getting the date column right. That is the actual work, and it is the part a converter can do for you.
The worse version: nothing looks broken
A date like 04/01/2026 is genuinely ambiguous. It is 4 January read month-first and 1 April read day-first, and both readings are valid dates, so nothing can be flagged as an error. If your bank writes day-first and the import reads month-first, your transactions are silently filed in the wrong months. The totals still add up. The reconciliation just quietly refuses to match.
This is why the dangerous rows are the ones between the 1st and the 12th of a month. 28/04/2026 has no valid month-first reading, so it either fails loudly or gets corrected. 04/01/2026 never does.
Why guessing row by row makes it worse
The naive approach is to read each date on its own and take whichever interpretation works. Applied to a real statement, that produces a file where some rows are day-first and others are month-first — the first twelve days of each month read one way, the rest the other. That is harder to spot and harder to unpick than a file that is uniformly wrong.
QBOKit decides the format once, from the whole column. If the column contains a value whose first number is above 12 and none whose second number is, the whole file is day-first, and every row is read that way including the ambiguous ones. If the column genuinely gives no clue, the converter tells you it is ambiguous and asks you to pick, rather than guessing silently.
What the converted file contains
The ambiguity only exists in slash-separated text. The formats we write avoid it where they can:
| Output | How dates are written |
|---|---|
| .QBO and .OFX | YYYYMMDD, e.g. 20260401. No ambiguity is possible in this form, which is one good reason to prefer these over CSV. |
| Clean CSV (QuickBooks) | MM/DD/YYYY, applied consistently to every row. |
| Clean CSV (Xero) | DD/MM/YYYY, applied consistently to every row. |
| .QIF | MM/DD/YYYY. See the QIF guide — QIF never standardised its date format, so check one date after importing. |
If you have already imported the wrong dates
- Do not fix them one by one if there are more than a handful. Exclude them, as Intuit's answer above describes, and import a corrected file instead.
- Convert the original bank export again and check the preview before downloading. The preview shows the dates as the converter has read them, written
YYYY-MM-DDon purpose so there is nothing left to misread. - Watch out for a silent skip on re-import. If you are re-importing a
.QBO, QuickBooks remembers the transaction ids it has already seen and will quietly ignore them, so the corrected file can appear to do nothing. See why a re-import gets skipped and the switch that gives every transaction a fresh id.
The one check worth doing every time
Before you download, look at the preview and find a row dated between the 1st and the 12th of a month. The preview writes dates as YYYY-MM-DD, so 2026-04-01 can only mean 1 April. If that one row matches your statement, the rest of the file is right. It takes five seconds, and it is the only part of this that cannot be automated away, because only you know what your statement actually says.
Sources
- Bank transaction import brought wrong dates — QuickBooks Community, answered by a QuickBooks Team member, containing the 01/01/1970 symptom and the exclude-and-reimport fix.