YNAB export: how to move your budget into FireBudget

A YNAB export gives you your whole budget as two CSV files: your categories with every month’s assigned amounts, and your full transaction history. FireBudget can build a new budget from those two files, so you keep your history when you leave YNAB. This guide covers the export, the import, what comes across, what does not, and the few things to tidy afterwards. It takes about fifteen minutes.

Part 1: Export from YNAB

YNAB’s export works in the web app, not the phone apps.

1. Sign in at app.ynab.com on your Mac.
2. Click your plan’s name at the top of the left sidebar.
3. Choose Export Plan.

YNAB downloads your data as two files. If your browser saves a zip file, double-click it in Finder to unzip it. You need:

• the file with Plan in its name, which contains your category groups, categories, and the amount assigned to each category in each month, and
• the file with Register in its name, which contains every transaction in every account.

Before you continue, open YNAB’s settings and note your date format and number format. FireBudget reads the dates in the export using the date format you choose for the new budget, so they need to match.

If your plan uses a decimal comma (common for euros and many other currencies), YNAB exports tab-separated .tsv files instead of comma-separated ones. FireBudget reads those too, so use them as they are. Dates written like 15.01.2024 import with the DD/MM/YYYY date format.

YNAB’s export does not include targets, category notes, or attached photos (YNAB help).

Part 2: Create the budget in FireBudget

A YNAB import always creates a new, empty budget. It never merges into an existing one, so your other FireBudget budgets are safe.

1. Open Manage Budgets in FireBudget and create a new budget.
2. Give it a name, and choose the currency, date format, and number format. Pick the same date format YNAB uses.
3. When asked How would you like to start?, choose Import from YNAB. FireBudget will not add its own starter categories, so you start with exactly your YNAB structure.

If you close the app partway through, the budget stays in an incomplete state and offers Resume YNAB import the next time you open it.

Part 3: Run the import

The import has five steps: Upload, Categories, Accounts, Summary, and Import.

1. Upload

Choose your Plan file and your Register file (FireBudget labels them Plan.csv and Register.csv) and click Parse Files. FireBudget reads them and shows what it found: how many transactions and accounts are in the register, how many categories and monthly budget entries are in the plan, and how many rows have problems. If many dates fail, the date format probably does not match. Go back and recreate the budget with the right one.

2. Review categories

You see your category groups and categories as they will be imported. Hidden categories are shown muted. YNAB’s Credit Card Payments group is skipped on purpose, because FireBudget handles card payments as transfers (more on that below).

3. Configure accounts

YNAB’s export does not say what kind of account each one is, so FireBudget guesses from the name and asks you to confirm. Names containing “Visa” or “credit card” are suggested as Credit, “mortgage” or “loan” as Loan, “401k” or “investment” as Tracking, and everything else as Cash.

Check each one. The type matters because it decides how transfers affect the budget:

• Cash for checking, savings, and money market accounts.
• Credit for credit cards and lines of credit.
• Loan for mortgages, car loans, and personal loans.
• Tracking for investments, property, and other assets you want in your net worth but not in your budget.

Loan and tracking accounts also need a payment category: the budget category that payments into that account come from. FireBudget suggests one by name. You cannot continue until each loan and tracking account has one.

4. Review the summary

The summary shows the number of accounts, categories, transactions, and budget entries, the date range, and how many transfers were paired up. Any rows that could not be read are listed. If more than one in ten rows has an error, FireBudget warns you before you continue.

5. Import

Click Start Import. FireBudget takes a full backup first, then imports everything in a single database transaction. If anything fails, nothing is imported and you can try again. When it finishes, click Go to your budget.

What comes across

• Category groups and categories, including hidden ones.
• Every month’s assigned amount for each category, so your budget history is intact.
• Accounts, with the types you confirmed.
• Transactions, with date, payee, memo, amount, and category. Income assigned to YNAB’s Ready to Assign goes to FireBudget’s Available to Budget.
• Transfers. Both sides of a YNAB transfer are matched and become one linked FireBudget transfer. A transfer to an account that is not in the export comes across as a single row in the Transfer category.
• Starting balances, with the right budget treatment for each account type.

Activity, available amounts, and running balances are then calculated by FireBudget from the imported data, so they come out consistent with FireBudget’s own rules.

What does not come across

• Cleared and reconciled status. Every transaction arrives uncleared.
• Closed accounts are imported as open.
• Scheduled transactions, which are not in YNAB’s export.
• Targets, notes, and flags, which FireBudget does not have.
• The Credit Card Payments categories and their assigned amounts.
• Split transactions. FireBudget has no splits. YNAB’s export lists each part of a split on its own row, so each part arrives as a separate transaction with its own category.

Part 4: Tidy up afterwards

A few minutes of cleanup gets the new budget into shape:

1. Compare balances. Check each account’s balance against YNAB or your bank. Differences usually point to a transfer that did not pair or a transaction outside the export.
2. Mark history as cleared. Select past transactions in each account, use Mark Cleared, and then Reconcile against your latest statement. That gives you a clean starting point.
3. Close old accounts that were closed in YNAB.
4. Recreate recurring bills. Open a bill’s latest transaction, turn on Make this transaction recurring, and set the interval. See recurring transactions without bank sync.
5. Check credit card categories. Spending on cards is now budgeted directly in each category. The credit card guide explains what to look at.

For the habits that change once you are off YNAB, read what changes when you switch.

What FireBudget does not do

FireBudget runs only on Macs with Apple Silicon (M1 or later). It does not connect to your bank, has no iPhone or Android app, and does not sync between devices. A YNAB import only creates a new budget. It cannot update an existing FireBudget budget from YNAB later, so do the import when you are ready to switch.