Switching from Dollarwise

Ten minutes of preparation saves most of the work later. Before you cancel anything:

1. Write down your buckets. Your Needs, Wants and Debt & Savings amounts live only inside Dollarwise, and no file carries them out. A screenshot is enough.
2. List the accounts you actually want. Cadence Money imports one file per account, so this is what tells you how many downloads to make.
3. Start your Cadence Money trial. Every plan includes a 14-day trial and a card is required to start it.

There is no published Dollarwise transaction export, so in most cases there is no file to bring across. It is still worth a look, because apps add export options: if you find one, Cadence Money reads any standard CSV with one transaction per row. Choose Budget App as the source type on the first step rather than Bank Statement.

If there is nothing to export, the bank route below is not a workaround. Your bank’s record is the original, and it usually reaches further back than the app does.

Every major bank offers this, though the wording differs - look for Download, Export or Statements once you have opened an account.

• Pick CSV if you are offered a choice. PDF, Excel and OFX files are not read by the import wizard.
• Take the widest date range on offer, usually between three and eighteen months. History is the one part of this move that is hard to recreate later.
• One file per account. If your bank exports several accounts into one file, split it in a spreadsheet before importing.
• Download credit cards separately. Cards print charges and payments the opposite way round from a chequing export, and the wizard can only correct that file by file.

The wizard is six steps and says 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 is safe.

1. Upload. Open the + menu, choose Import Transactions, pick Bank Statement (or Credit Card for a card export, which flips the signs so charges read as spending), then drop the file in.
2. Account. Say which account these transactions belong to. The dropdown lists the accounts you keep by hand, plus Create a new account at the top, which opens the account form here.
3. Mapping. Confirm which column is which. Cadence Money works them out from the header row, so this is usually a glance - but check Amount format, which says whether your bank uses one amount column, separate debit and credit columns, or an amount plus a type column. Getting it wrong turns a month of spending into a month of income.
4. Review. Look through the parsed rows and check the dates, amounts and merchant names. You can correct a category here, and each correction 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. If the file carries a running balance, a tickbox here offers to set the account’s balance from it.

• Dates, merchant names and amounts from any standard CSV.
• Categories, where the file has them. Cadence Money categorises everything anyway, so an export without them costs you nothing.
• Notes and a currency column, if your bank includes them.
• Your history in full, as far back as your bank exports.

• Your Dollarwise buckets and their amounts. These are settings rather than data, and they are rebuilt in a few minutes.
• The account each row belongs to. A bank CSV carries no account column Cadence Money recognises, so every row in a file lands in the one account you pick at the Account step. That is why one file per account matters.
• Progress, streaks and anything the app never let you export. There is no file behind them to read.
• Your Dollarwise subscription. Cancel it in the store you bought it from - installing Cadence Money does not end it.

With the history in, the budget is yours to design. Cadence Money is not built around one method, so 50/30/20 is available to you rather than imposed on you.

1. Create your budgets. Tap the + button and choose Budget, name it, pick Monthly or Annual, set the amount, and link the spending categories that feed it. Three budgets named Needs, Wants and Debt & Savings reproduce your old buckets exactly - most people go finer than that once they can.
2. Turn on rollover where it helps. An underspent month carries its remainder forward instead of resetting, which is what makes an irregular category behave.
3. Check the import. Settings → Imports lists every file you have brought in. From there you can move a file to a different account, or undo it completely and start again.
4. Decide how future months arrive. Keep importing a CSV, or connect the bank on the Cadence+ and Premium plans and let new transactions arrive on their own. Connecting an account takes nothing away from budgeting by hand.