Moving from Monarch Money to YNAB
Assembled from both records. Nothing here is an opinion — it is the difference between two rows, written out.
Your data — read this first
Monarch Money records transaction export as Yes, so take the export first. YNAB 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 YNAB’s own import attributes. Budgets and rules never transfer between two apps in this index.
What you gain
- Nothing recorded
What you lose
- Real estate Yes → No
What is unchanged
- Free tier, Account aggregation, Manual accounts, Edit transactions, Create manual transactions, Rules engine, Mass edit, Split transactions, History import, Export, Budgeting, Rollover budgeting, Recurring transactions, Goal tracking, Net worth, Balance history import, Reports, Trends, Partner or household, 2FA / MFA
32 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 Monarch Money first
Take the transaction export while your subscription is live. The record says export is available.
- Get the file into a format YNAB reads
Its record lists CSV · QFX · QIF. 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. YNAB reaches banks through Plaid, MX, TrueLayer. Banks named most often in YNAB’s 300 most recent App Store reviews: Plaid (6), Fidelity (5), Chase (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.