Switching from Mint

Ten minutes of looking around saves most of the work later.

1. Go and look for an old Mint export. Search your downloads, your email and any cloud backup for a CSV saved before March 2024. It is worth a real hunt.
2. Write down the budgets you want to keep. Mint’s budget amounts were settings rather than data, and no export carries them. A screenshot or a scribbled list is enough.
3. Start your Cadence Money trial. Every plan includes a 14-day trial and a card is required to start it. You do not need to connect a bank to import a file, so the whole move can happen inside the trial.

That file is the best history you will get, and Cadence Money reads it directly. Mint’s layout is recognised on sight - the giveaway is the Transaction Type column, which is where Mint put the direction of each row instead of a minus sign on the amount. On the first step of the wizard, choose Budget App as the kind of file you are bringing in. There is no mapping to do by hand.

The hunt is worth it because history is the part of this move you cannot recreate. A bank export usually reaches back a year or two at most, so a Mint file saved in 2023 holds months your bank will not re-supply.

There is no way to produce a new Mint export. The product is gone and Credit Karma did not carry its transaction history forward, so there is nothing left to request from Intuit. Your bank is the practical replacement, and in one way the better source: it is the original record rather than one app’s reading of it.

• 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. Most banks give three to eighteen months, and that gap is what the missing Mint file would have covered.
• One file per account, downloaded separately for chequing, savings and each card. Cards print charges and payments the opposite way round from a chequing export, which the wizard handles - but only if the card is its own file.

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 a Mint file or Bank Statement for a bank one, and drop the file in.
2. Account. Say which account the file belongs 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. On a recognised Mint file this is a glance - date, description, amount, category, notes and the type column carrying the direction are already matched.
4. Review. Check the parsed dates, amounts and names, and correct a category if you want to.
5. Duplicates. The file is compared against what the account already holds, before anything is written.
6. Confirm. A summary of what is about to land, and the button that writes it.

• Dates, descriptions and amounts, row for row.
• Your Mint categories, translated into Cadence Money categories. You can change any of them on the Review step.
• Notes, where you wrote them.
• Money in and money out. Mint wrote amounts without a sign and kept the direction in its type column - debit out, credit in. Cadence Money reads that pair, so an old file lands with spending as spending rather than as a year of income.

• Which account each row came from. A Mint export has no account column that Cadence Money reads, so every row in the file lands in the single account you choose on the Account step. If your Mint file covered several accounts, split it in a spreadsheet and import each part separately.
• Your Mint budgets and their amounts. Settings rather than data, and rebuilt in a few minutes.
• Bill reminders and alert settings. Nothing in the export describes them.
• The currency of each row. Mint’s file names none, so every row takes your default currency.
• Credit score history, which stayed with Credit Karma. Cadence Money does not track credit scores.
• Anything you never exported. There is no file behind it to read.

1. Rebuild your budgets. Tap the + button, choose Budget, set the amount and link the categories that feed it.
2. Check what landed. Settings → Imports lets you move a file to a different account, or undo it completely.
3. Fix categories once. Correcting a merchant’s category teaches Cadence Money for good, and a transaction rule makes it a certainty.
4. Decide how future months arrive. Keep importing a CSV, or connect the bank on the Cadence+ and Premium plans and let new transactions come in on their own.