Moving from Actual Budget to PocketGuard
Assembled from both records. Nothing here is an opinion — it is the difference between two rows, written out.
Your data — read this first
Actual Budget records transaction export as Yes, so take the export first. PocketGuard imports transaction history, so what you exported comes with you.
- Transactions
- Yes
- Balance history
- Yes
- Budgets
- Rebuilt by hand
- Rules
- Rebuilt by hand
- Attachments
- ?
Transactions, balance history and attachments are PocketGuard’s own import attributes. Budgets and rules never transfer between two apps in this index.
What you gain
- Refresh more than daily No → Yes
- Bill negotiation No → Yes
- Goal tracking No → Yes
- Trends No → Yes
What you lose
- Free tier Yes → No
- Mass edit Yes → No
- Investment transactions Yes → No
What is unchanged
- Account aggregation, Manual accounts, Edit transactions, Create manual transactions, Rules engine, History import, Export, Custom categories, Budgeting, Envelope budgeting, Rollover budgeting, Recurring transactions, Subscription cancellation, Net worth, Balance history import, Investment tracking, Reports, Credit scores, Partner or household
38 attributes are Unknown on one side and left out. Gains and losses are a diff of the two records.
How to do it
- Export from Actual Budget first
Take the transaction export while your subscription is live. The record says export is available.
- Import before you connect anything
Import the file first. Connecting banks first creates duplicates that then have to be merged one by one.
- Connect accounts inside the trial
Find out which of your banks fail before you are billed. PocketGuard reaches banks through Plaid, Finicity, Salt Edge. Banks named most often in PocketGuard’s 50 most recent App Store reviews: Amex (9), Fidelity (2) — read what they say before you connect those first.
- Rebuild budgets and rules
No app in this index imports another’s budgets or rules. Budgets are quick; rules are worth rebuilding as transactions arrive rather than all at once.