You're exploring a sample household budget. Every number you see is example data. Start your own profile to begin tracking your real finances — the sample profile stays available until you delete it.

Importing your initial data

Skip months of manual entry by pulling history from your bank — and learn which history is worth pulling.

You do not need historical transactions to start budgeting. The envelope method works from today forward. But two or three months of history makes the reports useful immediately and gives Auto-assign something to average over.

How much history to import

A pragmatic rule:

  • 0 months. You want to start clean and learn the app on live data. Perfectly valid.
  • 3 months. Enough for Auto-assign averages, last-month-spending shortcuts, and an honest Spending report. The sweet spot.
  • 6–12 months. You want trend lines, year-over-year context, and a full Net worth curve. Worth doing if your bank exports go back that far without fuss.
  • All-time. Only do this if you're consolidating a long Quicken/Actual/Mint archive and you actually want it. It's slow to reconcile and the marginal insight drops fast.

The flow

For each account that has history worth pulling:

  1. Export from the bank in any supported format. See Supported import formats for what works.
  2. On Import, pick the account you're importing into. This matters — transactions are tied to that account; you can't pick "all" and sort later.
  3. Drop the file. Project Budget detects the format, parses, and shows a preview table.
  4. Adjust column mapping if needed (CSV only — OFX/QFX/QIF are self-describing).
  5. Review the dedupe count. The importer skips rows that match account + date + amount + payee, so re-running the same file is safe.
  6. Click Import. Rows land in the register, marked as Cleared by default since the bank already posted them.

Categorizing the past

You have three reasonable approaches:

  • Leave it uncategorized. Reports won't be meaningful, but the balances are correct and you can categorize forward from today.
  • Bulk-categorize by payee. Filter the register to a payee like "Whole Foods", select all, set category to Groceries. Repeat for the top 20 payees. Covers 80% of transactions in 20 minutes.
  • Categorize every row. Tedious for a year of data, but produces clean historical reports. Worth it if you imported only a couple months.

Reconcile after importing

Once history is in, reconcile each account against its current statement balance. See Reconciliation. This is the moment to catch missing transactions and import duplicates the dedupe didn't catch.

What does not import

  • Goals — you set those in Project Budget; no bank knows about them.
  • Category structure — banks have their own "category" guesses on each transaction; Project Budget ignores them in favor of the categories you defined. You can map bank categories to yours later with bulk edits.
  • Transfers as paired entries — most exports send the two sides of a transfer as two separate transactions in two separate files. See Importing transfers for the cleanup pattern.
Loading…