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.

Switching from YNAB or Mint

What carries over, what works differently, and where to look for the equivalent feature.

Project Budget uses the same four-rule envelope method as YNAB and the same transaction-history shape as Mint, so the muscle memory transfers. The vocabulary and a few mechanics are different. This page maps them.

Coming from YNAB

The model is intentionally similar.

YNAB termProject Budget term
Ready to AssignReady to Assign — same idea, same name
Category AssignedAssigned
Category ActivityActivity
Category AvailableAvailable
Master categoryCategory group
Scheduled transactionRecurring template — see Recurring
ReconcileReconcile — same flow
Targets (Goals)Goals — four types vs YNAB's three

What's the same: every dollar gets a job, overspending in cash categories reduces next month's Ready to Assign, credit cards use a paired payment category.

What's different:

  • No direct bank import. Project Budget reads files you download. There is no link to Plaid or any bank API. See Importing your initial data.
  • No subscription. The app is free; there is no account to create.
  • Local-only data. Your budget lives in your browser, not on a server. See How storage works.
  • Recurring never posts automatically. Templates surface on the due date for you to approve, skip, or edit. See Skip vs post-now.
  • Reports are different but cover the same ground. YNAB's Spending, Income vs. Expense, Net Worth, and Age of Money all have equivalents — see Reports overview.

Migrating data from YNAB

YNAB's CSV export gives you one transactions file and one budget file per account.

  1. Use the per-account transactions CSV — the all transactions export is harder to dedupe.
  2. Create matching accounts in Project Budget first. See Your first account.
  3. Import each account's CSV separately. Project Budget's generic CSV detector handles YNAB's column names.
  4. Recreate categories by hand. The YNAB budget CSV is a snapshot of assignments, not the category structure, and the structures rarely map one-to-one.
  5. Set goals fresh on the Budget page.

Coming from Mint

Mint was a tracker, not a budget. The biggest mindset shift: you assign money before you spend it, not classify it after.

Mint termProject Budget term
Transactions tabRegister
TrendsReports
Budgets (per category cap)Goals — Monthly fixed type — see Goals
Goals (savings target)Goals — Reach a target by a date type
BillsRecurring templates
Net worth tileNet worth report

Migrating data from Mint

Mint's all-transactions CSV is one of the supported shapes. The flow:

  1. Export all transactions from Mint.
  2. Create the same accounts in Project Budget — all transactions is filtered by Account Name per row.
  3. On Import, select the account, then upload the same CSV repeatedly — once per account. The importer filters rows where Account Name matches the selected account.
  4. Reconcile each account against current statement balances.
  5. Build a category structure from scratch — Mint's auto-categories are a starting point at best.

A common rough patch

After migrating, the first month feels strange. Your reports look thin (one month of data isn't much), Auto-assign has nothing to average, and you're typing every assignment by hand. This is temporary; by month three the app does most of the assigning work for you.

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