Switching from Copilot Money

Do this while your Copilot Money subscription is still live. An export needs an account you can still sign in to, and your history is the one part of this move you cannot recreate afterwards.

1. Export before you cancel. Take the file first and cancel second, even if you already know you are leaving. A lapsed subscription is a locked export.
2. Decide which accounts you want. Copilot Money puts every account in one file. An import in Cadence Money belongs to one account, so splitting the export by account in a spreadsheet before you begin is what keeps the duplicate check and your balances meaningful.
3. Start your Cadence Money trial. Every plan includes a 14-day trial and a card is required to start it. You can import, budget and change your mind for the whole trial.

Copilot Money can download your transaction history as a CSV from its settings. The exact wording moves between versions, so look for an export or download option rather than a particular menu item, and take the longest date range it offers. Cadence Money will not choke on a large file.

• Leave the header row alone. Cadence Money recognises a Copilot Money file by its lowercase headers - date, name, amount and the account mask column in particular. Renaming or deleting those turns a layout that maps itself into one you map by hand.
• Do not reformat the dates. Copilot Money writes them as YYYY-MM-DD, which is unambiguous, so the day-first confusion other exports cause cannot arise here.

The wizard is six steps and tells you which one you are on at the top - Step 1 of 6 through Step 6 of 6. Nothing is written until the last one, so backing out part-way through is safe.

1. Upload. Open the + menu, choose Import Transactions, pick Budget App as the kind of file, then drop the export in.
2. Account. Say which account this file belongs to. The dropdown lists the accounts you keep by hand, plus Create a new account at the top, which opens the account form on the step itself.
3. Mapping. A Copilot Money file is recognised here rather than mapped: the step opens saying Detected Copilot format with every column already filled in. Glance over it and carry on.
4. Review. Check the parsed rows - dates, amounts, merchant names. Correcting a category here teaches Cadence Money for next time.
5. Duplicates. The file is compared against what the account already holds, before anything is written. On a first import there is usually nothing to report.
6. Confirm. A summary of what is about to land, and the button that writes it.

• Dates, merchant names and amounts, with the direction of every row corrected as it lands.
• Your Copilot Money categories, read from the file’s category column and matched to Cadence Money categories. Cadence Money categorises everything itself as well, so nothing arrives uncategorised.
• Notes, from Copilot Money’s note column.
• The account each row came from. Copilot Money names it on every row and Cadence Money reads that column without asking, so the label survives the move even though the file itself lands in the one account you chose on the Account step.

• Your budgets and their amounts. These are settings rather than data, and no export carries them. Rebuilding them takes a few minutes.
• Copilot Money rules and its recurring detection. Cadence Money has both, and both start fresh.
• Historical account balances. A budget app’s export carries no running balance column, so balances are something you set once per account rather than something the file restores.
• Tags, excluded flags and attachments. Columns Cadence Money has no home for are ignored, and receipts live outside the CSV entirely.
• Your Copilot Money subscription. Cancel it in the App Store - importing a copy of your data here does not end it.

1. Build your budgets. Tap the + button and choose Budget, name it, pick the kind you want, set the amount, and link the categories that feed it. Your imported history starts filling it in immediately.
2. Check what landed. Settings → Imports lists every file you have brought in, with its date range and how many transactions it holds. From there you can move a file to a different account, or undo it completely and start again.
3. Decide how future months arrive. Keep importing a CSV, or connect the bank directly on the Cadence+ and Premium plans and let new transactions arrive on their own - Canadian institutions included, which is the connection Copilot Money could not make.
4. Install it everywhere. The same account opens on iOS, Android and any browser, so the phone you carry no longer decides which budgeting app you can use.