Introduction
Importing your data from YNAB (You Need a Budget) 5 to MoneyWiz is easy. We have a lot of clients coming from YNAB (You Need a Budget) 5 and the import works well for them. YNAB (You Need a Budget) 5 can export accounts to CSV format. MoneyWiz not only supports import from this file type, it will import the transfers between your accounts as well as split payments you may have on your accounts, payees and categories.
Preparation
Before starting to export your accounts, please take a note of their Opening Balance. You would need this information when creating your account in MoneyWiz. For the accounts to come up with the right balance after the import they need to have their Opening Balance set as of the date of the first transaction that you will be importing.
Please note that if you don’t import all accounts, the other accounts might not come up with the correct balances, because of the transfers between them and the accounts you haven’t imported.
Exporting from your current application
Find the My Budget -> Export budget data link.
Your budget will now be downloaded to your Downloads folder. If you’re using Safari, you might see a warning. If this happened to you, please locate the file in Finder, click once on it to select it then after one second click again on the filename so that Finder allows you to change it. You can leave the name as Unknown – it’s only important that you add .zip at the end (notice the dot) so the final filename becomes Unknown.zip
Once you’ve done this, you can click twice on this file to unarchive it so a folder with two CSV files inside. The file you’ll need to use for import is called [Budget Name] as of [Date and time] – Register.csv
MoneyWiz will import your transactions for which you can create budgets in MoneyWiz. Note that due to how budgets work in MoneyWiz, you cannot import the other file ([Budget Name] as of [Date and time] – Budget.csv) to create your budgets automatically – you’ll need to re-create your budgets in MoneyWiz manually. See the budgets guide for more information!
Importing to MoneyWiz
It is important to note that YNAB (You Need a Budget) 5 exports the Starting Balance in the CSV file as a simple Income or Expense transaction, depending on whether the initial balance has been positive or negative. MoneyWiz will import this transaction as an income/expense respectively.
Now, if you create your accounts in MoneyWiz with Starting Balance of zero, all accounts will come up with the correct balance. However, please note that the Initial Balance transaction will be considered in the reports, so your expenses/incomes would appear more or less then they actually are.
The better solution would be to create the accounts in MoneyWiz with the accurate Opening Balance, import the CSV file from YNAB (You Need a Budget) 5 and then delete the imported Opening Balance entries from all accounts. They would be the first transaction on each account. You can also use the search box to search for „Starting Balance” (without the quotes) and choose to see result from all accounts (with the arrow in the search box or the “eye” on Accounts). With the mass edit functionality of MoneyWiz for Mac you can select all such entries and delete them at once.
Review the Import OFX, QFX, QIF, CSV and MT940 files from banks or other applications guide to see how to set up MoneyWiz before you import your data to MoneyWiz.