Moving from Empower (Personal Capital) to Monarch Money
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. Monarch Money 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 Monarch Money’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
- Credit scores No → Yes
- Partner or household No → Yes
What you lose
- Free tier Yes → No
What is unchanged
- Account aggregation, Refresh more than daily, Manual accounts, Edit transactions, Create manual transactions, Rules engine, Mass edit, Export, Custom categories, Budgeting, Recurring transactions, Bills, Goal tracking, Net worth, Investment tracking, Investment transactions, Reports, Adviser access, 2FA / MFA
39 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.
- Get the file into a format Monarch Money reads
Its record lists CSV. If your export is something else, a spreadsheet can usually re-save it as CSV.
- 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. Monarch Money reaches banks through Plaid, MX, Finicity. Banks named most often in Monarch Money’s 450 most recent App Store reviews: Fidelity (10), Plaid (7), Chase (4), Amex (3), Schwab (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.