Accounting files overview

UPC Accounting keeps the books of a member’s businesses and personal finances inside United Pet Club. It exchanges data with other software only through files: the member uploads a file your software produced, or downloads a file for your software to read. This section is the contract for those files, for accounting-software vendors, banks and bookkeepers who build tooling around them.

Preview

UPC Accounting is in Preview and is not generally available yet. The formats below are what the Preview reads and writes; details may change before full release, and the changelog will say so.

Not affiliated

QuickBooks, Xero, Sage, Wave, FreshBooks, Zoho Books, DATEV, ADP, Gusto, Wagepoint, Payworks and the banks named in this section are trademarks of their owners. United Pet Club is not affiliated with, endorsed by or certified by any of them. The layouts are read as those products and banks publicly describe them; they are not vendor-certified integrations.

Files only: no live sync

There is no live connection in either direction:

• No bank feed and no open-banking API connection. A member downloads a statement or an open-banking JSON export from their bank, then uploads it.
• No QuickBooks, Xero or other accounting-software API connection. Data moves as the files those programs import and export.
• No partner API for the books. The routes the United Pet Club Dashboard uses to upload and download these files are private to it and are not part of the Partner API. Build against the file formats on these pages, not against those routes.

The families

Family	Direction	Formats	Page
Bank statements	Import	OFX 1.x / 2.x, QFX, QBO, bank CSV, Excel, ISO 20022 camt.052 / 053 / 054, SWIFT MT940 / MT942, BAI2	Bank statements
Open-banking exports	Import	FDX, UK Open Banking v3.1, Berlin Group NextGenPSD2, Australia CDR (JSON)	Open-banking exports
Other accounting software	Import	QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop IIF, Xero, Sage, Wave, FreshBooks, Zoho Books, any journal by column mapping	Accounting software imports
Statutory audit files	Import and export	France FEC, Germany DATEV Buchungsstapel, OECD SAF-T 2.00, Poland JPK_KR	Imports, Exports
UPC templates	Import and export	CSV per list, or one .xlsx workbook	UPC templates
Exports for other programs	Export	QuickBooks Online journal CSV, IIF, Xero manual journal CSV	Exports
Full-entity archive	Export	One .zip of CSV files	Exports
Payroll provider registers	Not available	Recognized, not imported in Preview	Payroll registers

A statement goes into one bank, card or cash account of the books. Every other import goes through an import wizard where the member maps accounts and contacts, checks a dry run, then posts. Neither path asks your file to carry any United Pet Club identifier.

Rules every file follows

Size limits

Limit	Value
Bank statement or open-banking file	10 MB and 50,000 statement lines
Accounting-software, statutory or template file	25 MB
One import of entries	5,000 entries and 25,000 lines; split a larger file by period
An opening trial balance	One opening entry of at most 500 lines
Rows read from any file	250,000
One field, cell, XML text node or SWIFT field	32 KB
Columns in one row	1,024
An .xlsx workbook	256 MB once unzipped and 1,024 parts; a part over 1 MB may not be compressed more than 250:1
XML or JSON nesting	64 levels
Export, one download	100,000 journal lines (see Size of an export)

A file over a limit is refused as a whole. Nothing from it is posted.

Text encodings

A text file’s encoding is decided in this order:

1. A byte-order mark (UTF-8, UTF-16 LE / BE, UTF-32).
2. The encoding the format declares: OFX CHARSET / ENCODING, the XML declaration.
3. Strict UTF-8, when every byte of the file is valid UTF-8 (plain ASCII counts).
4. Otherwise Windows-1252.

ISO-8859-1 is used only when the file declares it. ISO-8859-15 (common in FEC files) reads correctly as Windows-1252 for every accented letter. Send UTF-8 whenever the format allows it.

XML safety

Every XML file (camt, OFX 2.x, SAF-T, JPK_KR, and the parts inside an .xlsx) is read with DTD processing off and no external resolution. A file that declares a <!DOCTYPE …> is refused, whatever the DTD says. Do not emit a DOCTYPE. The 1 KB entity cap and the size limits above apply too.

Numbers and dates

Where the format does not fix them, amounts are read in any of these forms: 1,234.56, 1.234,56, 1 234,56 (also with a no-break or narrow no-break space), 1'234.56, (45.67), 45.67-, -$45.67, CA$ 45.67, 45.67 CR / 45.67 DR, the Unicode minus, and exponent form. A column’s decimal mark is judged on all of its values; a lone 1,234 is a thousands separator unless the column shows otherwise.

Dates are read as ISO (2026-09-30, with or without a time), yyyyMMdd, numeric dates with /, - or . in any order, two-digit years (pivot 80), and month names in English, French and German. When nothing in a column settles day-first against month-first (01/02/2026), a file with a decimal comma is read day-first and any other file month-first, with a warning. Write ISO dates to avoid the guess.

Duplicate detection

Re-sending overlapping data is safe:

• Bank lines are keyed by the bank’s own transaction id (OFX FITID, camt AcctSvcrRef, open-banking transactionId, MT940 and BAI2 bank reference). Without one, the key is a hash of the date, the amount and the memo (else the counterparty), and repeats inside one statement are numbered in file order. Two identical purchases on one day both import; re-importing an overlapping statement imports only its new lines.
• The same statement file (byte for byte) is refused the second time.
• Journal entries from other software are keyed by the program, journal, type, number and date of a numbered entry, or by the date and the net amount per account of an unnumbered one. An entry already imported is skipped.

Keep transaction ids and entry numbers stable across exports: a changed id makes the same transaction look new.

Currency and account matching

• A statement’s currency must be the bank account’s currency. Lines in another currency are counted as skipped and never enter the balance.
• A file with several accounts imports the one whose last four characters match the bank account in the books; failing that, the only one in the account’s currency; otherwise it is refused with the accounts it holds.
• Account numbers are kept masked to their last four characters. Memo text is kept as written.
• A file from other software that states its books’ currency must state the UPC books’ currency. Foreign-currency lines keep their currency, amount and rate.

Exported text is formula-safe

Every CSV and IIF export prefixes a text value that starts with =, +, -, @, a tab or a carriage return with an apostrophe ('), so a spreadsheet shows it as text instead of running it. Amounts and dates are never prefixed. If your software reads the text back, strip one leading apostrophe from such values. See Exports.

What the member sees

UPC Accounting reads each file before anything is stored: the detected format and how sure the detection is, the period, balances, the first lines and any notes from the reader. A file the books cannot place can be read by choosing its format by hand or by mapping its columns. The wizard’s dry run lists every problem before a single entry posts, and an import of other software’s books can be undone as a whole.