Switching from Piere

Three things, in this order. The first matters more than the rest of the article put together.

1. Switch off your automated Moves. Piere can transfer money between your accounts on its own, and those rules keep running whether or not you are still looking at the app. Turn them off before you export anything, so a transfer does not fire while you are halfway through moving out.
2. Decide which accounts you actually want. A Piere export does not say which account a row came from, so if you want per-account history, split the file in a spreadsheet first and import one file per account.
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.

Piere exports your transaction history as a CSV. Take the widest date range it offers - history is the one part of this move that is hard to recreate later.

The file you get is a nine-column layout, and it is worth knowing why that helps: it is byte for byte the layout Mint used, down to the separate Transaction Type column that says whether a row was money in or money out. Cadence Money has read that layout since it supported Mint files, so a Piere export needs no manual column mapping at all - as long as you keep the file as it comes. Renaming columns or re-saving it through a spreadsheet is what turns a recognised layout into one you have to map by hand.

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 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 Piere export 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 on the step itself.
3. Mapping. For a Piere file this is a glance rather than a task: the date, description, amount, category and notes columns are already matched, and Amount format is already set to the amount-plus-type shape the file uses.
4. Review. 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, descriptions and amounts, for the whole range you exported.
• Money in and money out, read from the Transaction Type column rather than guessed at from the sign, which is why a Piere file does not arrive inverted.
• Your categories, translated. Piere uses the Mint category names, which Cadence Money maps onto its own as it reads the file.
• Notes on each transaction, where you wrote any.

• Which account each row came from. The layout has no account column, so everything in one file lands in the one account you chose at the Account step. Splitting the export per account beforehand is the fix.
• Your Moves and their automation rules. They are settings inside Piere rather than rows in a file, and Cadence Money has no equivalent - it never moves your money.
• Goal progress driven by those transfers. The transactions themselves come across; the goals counting them are rebuilt in a few minutes.
• Historical account balances. A budget-app export carries transactions, not a running balance, so set each balance yourself once the rows are in.
• Currency labels. The layout has no currency column, so every row takes your default currency.
• Your Piere subscription. Cancel it in the store you bought it from - installing Cadence Money does not end it.

1. Check what landed. Settings → Imports lists every file you have brought in, with its date range. From there you can move a file to a different account, or undo it completely and start again.
2. Set your account balances. Nothing in the file says what an account is worth today, so type each one in once - net worth follows from there.
3. Rebuild your budgets and goals. Tap the + button and choose Budget or Goal. Your imported history is already categorised, so a new budget shows you real spending against it straight away.
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 come in on their own. Either way, Cadence Money reads your accounts and never moves money between them.