Switching from Monarch Money

Three things in order, and the first is the one that is hard to undo.

1. Export before you cancel. Your transaction history is the one thing you cannot recreate later, and it lives behind your Monarch login.
2. Decide which accounts you want. Cadence Money imports one file into one account, so a Monarch export covering five accounts is best split into five files before you start.
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 your history can go in before you decide anything.

Monarch’s transaction export is a web feature rather than a phone one. Sign in on a computer, open your settings, and look for the data or download section - it offers your transactions as a CSV. Take everything rather than a date range.

The file has one row per transaction, with columns for the date, the merchant, the category, notes and the amount, plus a column holding the raw description your bank sent - Monarch calls it Original Statement. That column is the fingerprint Cadence Money matches the layout on. Monarch also writes its dates year-first, so there is no day-versus-month guesswork to get wrong.

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, pick Budget App as the kind of file, then drop the export in. Use Budget App even for a credit card - Monarch has already signed the amounts, and Credit Card would flip them.
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 on the step itself.
3. Mapping. Cadence Money should say Detected Monarch Money format here, with the date, merchant, category, notes and amount columns already matched.
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.

• Dates, merchant names and amounts, in full.
• Your Monarch categories, translated. Every row is categorised the way a synced transaction is, and where nothing else answers, your Monarch category is used - read through a Monarch-specific list, so Bars & Alcohol, Rideshare and the rest land in the matching Cadence Money category.
• Notes on each transaction.
• The original statement description, where you map that column.
• Your history, as far back as the export goes.

• Which account each row came from. Cadence Money does not read an account column for this layout, so every row in a file lands in the one account you choose at the Account step. That is why splitting the export first matters - though a whole file can be moved to a different account afterwards from Settings → Imports.
• Budget amounts and how you had them allocated. These are settings rather than data, and no export carries them. They are rebuilt in a few minutes.
• Monarch rules and its recurring merchant detection. Cadence Money has its own of both, working from your history once it is in.
• Goals and their progress, and investment holdings and performance history. Goals are quick to recreate; investments are connected or entered fresh.
• Your household. Monarch’s household members do not come across with the file. Import into one Cadence Money account, then invite the other people from Settings → Household Members. Each invite has to go to an email address that does not already have its own Cadence Money account.
• Your Monarch subscription. Cancel it with Monarch - importing a file here does not end it.

1. Rebuild your budgets. Tap the + button, choose Budget, name it, pick Monthly or Annual, set the amount and link the spending categories that feed it. Your Monarch amounts are the starting point.
2. Check what landed. Settings → Imports lists every file you have brought in, how many transactions it holds and the date range it covers. From there you can move a file to a different account, or undo it completely and start again.
3. Teach it your merchants. One correction is enough - change a merchant’s category once and that choice is applied from then on. For something that should always hold, write a transaction rule from the + menu; rules run ahead of everything else.
4. Decide how future months arrive. Keep importing a CSV whenever it suits you, or connect the bank on the Cadence+ and Premium plans and let new transactions come in on their own.