Switching from YNAB

• You need a Cadence Money account. Every plan includes a 14-day trial, and a card is required to start it.
• You do not need to connect a bank. The whole move runs from a file.
• Nothing leaves YNAB. Exporting copies your data out rather than deleting anything. Keep your YNAB budget until you are happy with what landed here.
• Count your accounts. One import belongs to one account in Cadence Money, so a budget covering a chequing account, a card and savings moves most easily as three files, one per account.

1. Open YNAB in a web browser. The export lives in the web app, not in the mobile apps.
2. Open the budget you are moving, then choose Export budget data from the budget’s menu.
3. You get a ZIP file. Unzip it, and you will find two CSVs: a register, which is every transaction you have ever entered, and a budget file, which is the amount you assigned to each category each month.
4. Keep the register - that is the file Cadence Money reads, and the one with your history in it.
5. Optional, and worth it if your budget covers several accounts: open the register in a spreadsheet, sort by the Account column, and save one CSV per account.

The import wizard is six steps and says which one you are on at the top, from Step 1 of 6 to Step 6 of 6. Nothing is written until the last one, so backing out part-way is safe.

1. Upload. Open the + menu, choose Import Transactions, pick Budget App as the kind of file, then drop the register in.
2. Account. Say which account these transactions belong to. If you have not created it yet, choose Create a new account at the top of the dropdown and fill the form in on the step itself.
3. Mapping. YNAB’s register is the most distinctive layout Cadence Money reads - the Outflow and Inflow pair plus YNAB’s own Flag column identify it on sight - so this step is a confirmation. Glance at it and continue.
4. Review. Check the dates, amounts and payees. Correcting a category here teaches Cadence Money that merchant for next time.
5. Duplicates. Your file is compared against what the account already holds. 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.

Repeat that for each file if you split the register by account. Full detail on every step, including the duplicate passes, is in Importing Transactions.

YNAB splits an amount across two always-positive columns - Outflow for money going out, Inflow for money coming in, with one of the pair always zero. Most importers want a single signed column and leave you to flatten the two by hand in a spreadsheet first.

Cadence Money reads both columns and works out the direction itself, so there is nothing to prepare. If you edit the file for some other reason, keep both columns and their headers - they are part of what makes the layout recognisable.

• Dates, payees and memos. The payee becomes the transaction name and the memo becomes its note.
• Amounts, read correctly from the Outflow and Inflow columns.
• Your YNAB categories, read from the Category column and translated to Cadence Money categories.
• The account each transaction came from. YNAB names an account on every row, and Cadence Money keeps it on the transaction rather than labelling everything with the file name.

A category from YNAB is used where nothing better applies: your own transaction rules and what Cadence Money has already learned both run ahead of the file.

• Assigned and available amounts per category. Those live in the second file in the ZIP, and they are a plan rather than a history, so nothing reads them.
• Targets and the funding progress against them.
• Scheduled and recurring transactions.
• Age of Money and other figures YNAB derives from your budget rather than storing on a transaction.
• Cleared and flag status. The Flag column is used to recognise the file and nothing else.
• Account balances. The register carries no running balance column, so nothing is filled in from the file. The Confirm step can still offer to update the balance from what just landed.
• A currency per row. The register does not name one, so every row takes your default currency. A YNAB budget is single-currency anyway; if you ran two, import them as two files against two accounts.

Your history is in. What is left is the part that was a plan in YNAB rather than a record:

• Create your budgets. They are flexible rather than zero-based, so you can set them loosely and adjust, and rollover carries an unspent amount forward the way an envelope does.
• Turn anything you were saving towards into a goal, which is the closest thing here to a YNAB target.
• Check your categories against a month of imported transactions and correct anything that looks wrong. One correction is enough for Cadence Money to apply it from then on.