Moving from Empower (Personal Capital) to Actual Budget
Assembled from both records. Nothing here is an opinion — it is the difference between two rows, written out.
Your data — read this first
Empower (Personal Capital) records transaction export as Yes, so take the export first. Actual Budget 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 Actual Budget’s own import attributes. Budgets and rules never transfer between two apps in this index.
What you gain
- History import No → Yes
- Rollover budgeting No → Yes
- Balance history import No → Yes
What you lose
- Refresh more than daily Yes → No
- Goal tracking Yes → No
What is unchanged
- Free tier, Account aggregation, Manual accounts, Edit transactions, Create manual transactions, Rules engine, Mass edit, Export, Custom categories, Budgeting, Recurring transactions, Retirement planning, Net worth, Investment tracking, Investment transactions, Reports, Credit scores, Partner or household
41 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 Empower (Personal Capital) 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
Find out which of your banks fail before you are billed. Actual Budget reaches banks through SimpleFIN, GoCardless, Enable Banking, Akahu, Pluggy.
- 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.