Tips for Importing a Large Mint CSV File

by Sean Ellis

Last Updated September 29, 2022 21:20

Since one error can cause an entire upload to fail, sometimes it's easier to break up your transactions from one big CSV file into multiple smaller ones. Using the individual account uploader is a quicker way to take incremental steps and confirm things are working.

Here are the steps we recommend:

Download the big Mint CSV file
Open up the big CSV and split it up into one CSV file for each account you plan to have in Monarch. So if you have 3 accounts you plan to import in Monarch it would be 3 CSV files.
In Monarch, create all the accounts you plan to import first (before importing anything). They can be either synced or manual accounts. If the account has zero transactions in it, put in one manual transaction just so you can see how the fields are formatted when you download the CSV in the next step.
Go to each individual account in Monarch and in the top right click edit -> Download CSV
Now you should have one CSV for each account in Mint and one CSV for each account in Monarch. Copy and paste from the individual CSV's in step 2 into the Monarch file you downloaded in step 4. This makes sure the columns and formatting will line up with Monarch's format. You might need to edit things a bit with the currency and date format in the CSV directly.
Use the edit -> Upload CSV function at the top right of the account you want to import to (don't use the multiple account Mint uploader). Start with the account with the smallest number of transactions first and verify it is imported correctly before doing another account. If you have more than 5,000 transactions in a file try breaking them into multiple files based on their date range (2-3,000 is a good amount).

A few other tips:

The biggest reason an import fails is character encoding or formatting. We try to parse and return errors in the UI but can't catch them all.
- Incorrectly formatted headers, special characters, or missing info is the leading cause of failed uploads.
Using the single account uploader will just upload everything from the CSV verbatim. There is no parsing or trimming of date ranges like the multi-account importer tries to do by lining up the earliest date in Monarch with the latest date in the CSV.
If you get to the final screen where it says "processing" with the green check marks it should complete within a few seconds (1 min tops). If it's stuck after a minute you don't have to wait on that screen - just close or open another tab and check to see if the import worked. Sometimes that screen gets hung but the import works.

For a more general article on how to import from Mint check out the article here.

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