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Moving from YNAB or Actual Budget: CSV import step by step

Updated

Switching budgeting tools is frightening for exactly one reason: the fear of losing your history. Here is what actually travels, what does not, and how to do it without losing an evening.

First, what you will not bring

Better said upfront than discovered halfway.

Your past transactions come across. Date, payee, amount, and in some cases the memo.

Your monthly budget history does not. The amounts you assigned to each category last March, the carry-overs, the corrections — all of that stays in the tool you are leaving. This is not an Arca limitation in particular: data models differ too much between applications for a faithful import to mean anything.

It matters less than it sounds. An envelope budget lives in the present: what counts is the state of your envelopes today, not a reconstruction of last year’s trade-offs. Keep your old export somewhere safe as an archive.

From YNAB

1. Export. From the plan settings, request an export of your data. YNAB produces two separate files: the plan (budgets per category and month) and the register (your transactions). The register is the one you need.

2. Watch the format — trap number one for a euro budget. YNAB delivers TSV, tab-separated, rather than CSV whenever the plan’s currency uses a comma as the decimal separator. The euro does. A file named “.csv” but separated by tabs produces an import where the entire row lands in a single column, and it looks like a bug when it is only a separator problem.

Open the file in a spreadsheet, check the columns are actually split, and save it again as comma-separated CSV if needed.

3. Trap number two: two amount columns. The YNAB register carries headers along the lines of Account, Date, Payee, Category Group, Category, Memo, Outflow, Inflow, Cleared, Flag. Spending sits in Outflow, income in Inflow — two distinct columns, where Arca expects a single amount, negative for spending.

In the spreadsheet, add an Amount column computed as Inflow − Outflow. Spending becomes negative, income stays positive. That is the only manipulation genuinely required.

From Actual Budget

Simpler: export your transactions as CSV from the Transactions view. One amount column, already signed, nothing to recompute.

If you are leaving a self-hosted instance, keep a full backup of the budget file before shutting the server down — that is your archive.

In Arca

1. Create your accounts first. Import happens account by account, so the destination account must exist. Recreate the same structure as in your old tool: a current account, a savings account, a card, and so on.

2. Import. From Import transactions, drop the file in. Arca needs at least three columns: date, payee, amount. Map your columns to those fields, flip the sign if your bank exports spending as positive, and pick the destination account.

3. Read the preview before confirming. It separates new rows from those already linked. That is what makes the operation safe: if you re-import the same statement, or a period overlapping an earlier import, duplicates are not created. So you can proceed in small chunks without risk.

4. Recreate your categories, then assign. Categories do not come across with the import: recreate your envelopes, then assign the money actually sitting in your accounts. Do not try to re-budget past months — envelope budgeting is settled in the present.

The one check that matters

Just one, but do it: each account’s balance in Arca must equal the real balance your bank shows.

If the difference is zero, the import is good. If it is not, the cause is almost always one of three:

Until that balance matches, do not start budgeting: you would be assigning money that does not exist.

And afterwards

You can export your Arca data at any time, as CSV, from the Transactions page — and a full backup from Settings → Data and privacy. That is deliberate: a budgeting tool you cannot leave is not a tool, it is a trap.