Switching from Lunch Money

The two apps are close relatives: both independent, both privacy-first, and neither sells your data or trains AI on it. This is a move between similar tools rather than an escape, and it is worth ten minutes of preparation.

1. Check which currencies you hold. Cadence Money supports Canadian dollars, US dollars and pounds sterling. Lunch Money supports over 160, and this is the one genuine blocker: rows in any other currency have nowhere to land. Check your own data before you commit.
2. List the accounts you actually want. You will export one file per account, so this is what tells you how many downloads to make.
3. Screenshot your budgets and rules. Neither travels in a transaction file, in either direction, so a picture is enough to rebuild from.
4. Start your Cadence Money trial. Every plan includes a 14-day trial and a card is required to start it. Lunch Money gives you 30 days, so running both for a fortnight is a fair way to decide.

Lunch Money exports transactions as a CSV from its own transactions view. Take the whole history rather than the current month - the duplicate check means a wide export costs you nothing.

Filter to one account before each export. Cadence Money reads the Lunch Money layout automatically, but that layout has no column naming the account a row belonged to, so a single mixed file would put chequing, savings and credit card rows into whichever account you pick on the way in.

The wizard is six steps and tells you which one you are on at the top - it reads Step 1 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, pick Budget App as the kind of file, then drop your export in.
2. Account. Say which account these transactions belong to. This is the step that matters most for a Lunch Money file: every row lands in the account you pick here. Choose Create a new account at the top of the dropdown if you need one.
3. Mapping. Cadence Money matches Lunch Money’s Date, Payee and Amount columns on sight, and picks up Category, Currency and Notes with them.
4. Review. Check the parsed dates, amounts and names. Correcting a category here teaches Cadence Money how you categorise that merchant.
5. Duplicates. Cadence Money compares the file against what it already holds for that account, before anything is written.
6. Confirm. A summary of what is about to land, and the button that writes it.

Repeat for each account file. More detail on every step is in Importing Transactions.

• Dates, payees and amounts - the substance of your history, which is what makes reports meaningful from day one.
• The currency on each row. Lunch Money is one of the few exports that names it, and Cadence Money maps that column automatically, so a mixed CAD and USD account is not flattened into your default currency.
• Notes from the Notes column.
• Your categories, as a starting point. Cadence Money categorises imported rows with its own rules and learned merchant history first, and falls back to the category in your file. The column is used, but it does not overrule what you have taught the app.

• The account each transaction was in. The Lunch Money export carries no account column that Cadence Money can read, so every row lands in the one account chosen at the Account step. Exporting one file per account is what works around it.
• Budget amounts and rollover settings. No CSV format carries budgets.
• Rules, and the recurring transactions they drive. Cadence Money finds recurring payments from the imported history on its own, so this is less work than it sounds.
• Anything in an unsupported currency. Rows outside Canadian dollars, US dollars and pounds sterling have no home here. If that is most of your data, Lunch Money is the better tool.
• Anything built on the Lunch Money API. Lunch Money publishes a developer API, so scripted exports, spreadsheet syncs and community integrations written against it will not follow you. Cadence Money’s equivalent is an official MCP server that connects an AI assistant to your data - good for questions and summaries, not a drop-in replacement for a script.

Two things are worth doing straight away: set each account’s balance so net worth is right, and recreate your budgets from your screenshots. Recurring payments are found for you from the history you brought in, so bills need reviewing rather than rebuilding.

Every file you bring in stays listed under Settings → Imports, with how many transactions it holds and the date range it covers. From that list you can move a file to a different account, or undo the whole import and try again - the safety net if you discover a mixed export after the fact.