OpenQBW

Open specification and open-source parser for the QuickBooks Desktop company file (.qbw) format.

Intuit has announced end-of-life for QuickBooks Desktop, forcing small businesses either onto an expensive cloud subscription or to lose practical access to their own books. OpenQBW reverse engineers the on-disk file format from publicly available files, writes it up as a specification, and ships a Rust parser so that the accounting data a business has already paid for stays accessible.

Status

OpenQBW is in active development. The current code can:

• Open a .qbw file and decode all pages (SA17 page-store + Intuit's additive-progression obfuscation).
• Enumerate user tables via the SA17 SYSTABLE catalog.
• Parse SYSCOLUMN, SYSINDEX, SYSOBJECT system catalogs.
• Extract invoice line items and transaction headers at row granularity.
• Attribute pages to tables using a width-band + content-signature validator (Phase 6, WP-6Z).
• Export the parsed catalog and lineitems to a SQLite database.

On the Rock Castle sample file the lineitem extractor reaches 13,375 / 13,375 invoices and a grand total of $399,914,792.78, matching the value QuickBooks itself reports for the same file.

A full write-up of the format work lives in SPECIFICATION.md and the empirical notebook in re/NOTES.md.

Non-goals

• Shipping, linking, or distributing any Intuit code or trademarks.
• Breaking passwords or DRM. OpenQBW targets the on-disk layout of company files that the lawful owner can already open.
• Writing .qbw files. OpenQBW is read-only.

Use cases

• Data liberation for users leaving the QuickBooks Desktop ecosystem. Export your transactions to CSV, SQLite, or IIF so you can move them to another accounting package, or just keep an offline copy for the legally required retention period after the SaaS subscription lapses.
• Forensic accounting and litigation support. Read a .qbw file without owning a QuickBooks license, including offline copies on machines where the QB application has been uninstalled.
• Audit and discovery. Inventory tables, indexes, row counts, and surface gaps that suggest deleted records or schema drift.
• Long-term archival. Keep an open-format snapshot of the books every fiscal year, independent of Intuit's product roadmap.

Install

OpenQBW depends on the OpenSQLAnywhere crate, which lives in a sibling directory via a relative path. Clone both side by side:

$ git clone https://github.com/Sigilweaver/OpenSQLAnywhere.git
$ git clone https://github.com/Sigilweaver/OpenQBW.git
$ cd OpenQBW
$ cargo build --release
$ ./target/release/openqbw --help

Rust 1.85+ is required (workspace uses edition 2024).

Python bindings

A PyO3-based extension lives in crates/openqbw-py and ships as a package named openqbw. To build and install into the active Python environment:

$ pip install maturin
$ cd crates/openqbw-py
$ maturin develop --release
$ python -c "import openqbw; r = openqbw.open('mybooks.qbw'); print(r.page_count, 'pages')"

See crates/openqbw-py/README.md for the full Python API.

CLI quickstart

# Inventory the user tables in a company file
$ openqbw catalog mybooks.qbw

# Cross-validate page-to-table attribution against SYSINDEX
$ openqbw verify mybooks.qbw

# List indexes (FK indexes only, summary mode)
$ openqbw indexes mybooks.qbw --fk-only --summary-only

# Export the catalog and lineitems to SQLite for inspection in any
# SQL tool (DB Browser, Datasette, pandas, ...)
$ openqbw export mybooks.qbw --out books.sqlite

# Other introspection subcommands
$ openqbw schema mybooks.qbw
$ openqbw nulls mybooks.qbw
$ openqbw validate-attribution mybooks.qbw

See docs/cli.md for the full subcommand reference.

Library usage

use openqbw::{iter_lineitems_with_attribution, PageAttribution};
use opensqlany::{ApModel, PageStore};

let store = PageStore::open("mybooks.qbw")?;
let model = ApModel::learn(&store);
let attrib = PageAttribution::build(&store, &model)?;

let mut total_cents: i128 = 0;
for li in iter_lineitems_with_attribution(&store, &model, &attrib) {
    total_cents += li.amount_cents as i128;
}
println!("invoice grand total: ${:.2}", total_cents as f64 / 100.0);
# Ok::<(), anyhow::Error>(())

Documentation

• SPECIFICATION.md - format specification (work in progress)
• docs/use-cases.md - extended use-case walkthroughs
• docs/migration-guide.md - leaving the QuickBooks ecosystem
• docs/format-overview.md - high-level pointer into the spec
• docs/cli.md - full CLI reference
• re/NOTES.md - the reverse-engineering lab notebook (C.1...C.57)

Legal and ethical

• No raw corpus repository is published. During corpus collection we found that several public GitHub repositories had accidentally committed real business financial data, including personal names, home addresses, phone numbers, and US Social Security / tax identification numbers. Affected repository owners have been contacted directly. Out of caution the full downloaded corpus is kept private and is not redistributed.
• QuickBooks(R) is a registered trademark of Intuit Inc. OpenQBW is an independent project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Intuit Inc.
• License: Apache-2.0. See also NOTICE and CONTRIBUTING.md.

Companion projects

• OpenSQLAnywhere -- the lower-level SA17 page-store reader OpenQBW depends on.