Switching from EveryDollar

Before you cancel anything, do these four things.

1. Check which tier you are on. The monthly CSV download is a Premium feature. On the free tier there is no export, which decides your route but not your outcome.
2. Write down your budget amounts. Your Groups, your line items and the amount budgeted for each live only inside EveryDollar. A screenshot of the current month is enough.
3. List the accounts you actually want. Cadence Money imports one file per account, so this is what tells you how many downloads to make.
4. Start your Cadence Money trial. Every plan includes a 14-day trial and a card is required to start it.

On Premium, EveryDollar downloads your transactions as CSV one month at a time. Open the budget for that month, use its download option, and repeat. A year of history is twelve files: tedious rather than hard.

Import them one after another, or paste them into one spreadsheet first, as long as the header row appears only at the top.

On the free tier there is no file to export, so your bank’s own record is the source. That is not a workaround - it is the original, and it usually reaches further back.

• 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. History is the one part of this move that is hard to recreate later.
• One file per account, split in a spreadsheet first if your bank exports several accounts together.
• Download credit cards separately. Cards print charges and payments the opposite way round from a chequing export.

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 to your account until the last one, so backing out part-way through is safe.

1. Upload. Open the + menu, choose Import Transactions, then pick Budget App for an EveryDollar download, Bank Statement for a chequing export, or Credit Card for a card export, which flips the signs so charges read as spending.
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.
3. Mapping. Confirm which column is which. For an EveryDollar file this is a real step rather than a glance - see below.
4. Review. Check the parsed 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 - which is what stops overlapping monthly files landing twice.
6. Confirm. A summary of what is about to land, and the button that writes it.

• Dates, merchant names and amounts, once you have mapped them.
• Your budget line items as categories, if you map the column holding them. Cadence Money categorises everything anyway, so a file without them costs you nothing.
• Anything else you point at on the mapping step, such as notes or a currency column. Unmapped columns are ignored.
• Your history in full, as far back as your files go.

• Your budgeted amounts, per line and per month. These are settings rather than data, and no export carries them.
• Baby Steps progress and your Ramsey account settings. There is no file behind them to read.
• Paycheck planning setup. Cadence Money organises income and bills rather than paychecks, so this is rebuilt rather than moved.
• Historical account balances. You set a balance once per account and Cadence Money carries it forward from there.
• Your EveryDollar subscription. Cancel it with Ramsey - starting with 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 zero-based budgeting 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. One budget per EveryDollar Group reproduces your old structure; most people customise it from there.
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 one to a different account, or undo it entirely.
4. Decide how future months arrive. Keep importing a CSV when it suits you, or connect the bank on the Cadence+ and Premium plans and let new transactions arrive on their own - in Canada as well as the USA.