If you're joining Monarch from another budgeting app, you may have a large number of transactions that you want to import to ensure Monarch has a complete picture of your financial history.
Since one error can cause an entire upload to fail, we recommend you break up your files containing over 5,000 transactions from one large .CSV file into multiple, smaller ones. Your smaller accounts can be uploaded five or more at a time.
To break up the large .CSV files and import them properly, follow these steps:
- Open up the large .CSV you downloaded from the other budgeting app, and split it up into multiple .CSV files - we recommend splitting it so you have one file for each account you plan to have in Monarch (i.e. if you have 3 accounts, you will create three .CSV files). Tip: If you still end up with more than 5,000 transactions in a single file, try breaking them into multiple files based on their date range (2-3,000 is a good amount).
- Prior to importing, ensure all of the accounts to which you will be importing transactions have already been created, either as synced or manual accounts.
- For each individual account in Monarch, click "Edit" in the top right corner and select "Download transactions." This will give you a new .CSV file from Monarch with the proper format to upload your existing CSV files. Tip: If any account has zero transactions in it, you won't be able to complete the download. In order to get around this limitation, add one manual transaction to the account in order to allow you to download the file properly.
- You'll now have two .CSV files for each account: one from your previous budgeting system or bank and one from Monarch.
- Copy and paste the data from your previous budgeting app file into Monarch's file, ensuring the data is pasted into the correct columns. You may need to edit the currency and date to ensure they use the same format as Monarch. Tip: Monarch uses a dash to indicate a negative number [i.e. -$500]. Some apps may use parenthesis [i.e. ($500)]. You'll need to remove any parenthesis and replace them with a dash to ensure the data is imported correctly.
- NOTE: If Monarch was able to pull in any history for your synced account (depending on the account, we may be able to pull up to two years of transaction history), and you upload transactions from your previous budgeting app that include transactions from that same period, you will end up with duplicate transactions listed in your Monarch account. To avoid this, you can do one of the following:
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- Clear all transactions from the Monarch account and rely only on the spreadsheet for history.
- Look at the earliest transaction date Monarch was able to pull and remove any transactions from your spreadsheet between that date and the current date.
- Once the Monarch file has been formatted correctly, and any duplicate transactions removed (if necessary), you can go back to the account page and click "Edit" at the top. Select "Upload Transactions" to upload the file. We recommend starting with the account containing the smallest number of transactions first, which will allow you to verify it is being imported correctly before doing another account.
A few other helpful tips: