Migrating from Mint

Lunch Money makes it easy to migrate your existing data from Mint (or any other app/bank providing CSV exports) and continue tracking your personal finance.

Quick Start

Starting with already synced accounts and want to add historical transactions via CSV?

👉 Option 2: Import directly into an existing synced account.

Started by importing historical transactions via CSV and now want to sync with your bank?

👉 I've imported my historical transaction. How do I get my accounts to sync now?

In both cases, remember to set the "Earliest import date" for your synced account to match the date of the last imported transaction in order to prevent duplicates!

Step 1: Export your existing transactions from Mint

To get started, you'll need a CSV (comma-separated value) file of your historical transactions from Mint. You can view instructions on how to obtain this here.

Mint only support exporting 10,000 rows at a time. If you have over 10,000 transactions, you may have more than 1 CSV file.

Step 2: Ready your account for migration

If you haven't signed up for a Lunch Money account yet, now is the time to do so! You can register here. After registration, you will be prompted to import your transactions from Mint. You're now ready to move onto Step 3.

If you're an existing Lunch Money user, you have a few options:

Option 1: Create a new budget to test the Mint migration tool.

In Lunch Money, you may create unlimited budgeting accounts per subscription. Click on the circle next to the "Logout" button to create a new budget if you want to test the migration tool separate from your existing data. After creating a new budget, select 'Import my data from Mint', as in the screenshot above.

Option 2: Import directly into an existing synced account.

Have you already started syncing a new account within Lunch Money, for which you have historical transactions from Mint?

You can import your historical transactions into a synced account for a complete view of your finances.

First, you'll need to enable the option to allow modifications to synced accounts. Go to the Accounts page, click into the account in question, and under 'Advanced Settings', enable 'Allow modifications to transactions'

You'll also want to fill in Earliest Import Date. This ensures that Lunch Money will not import transactions before a certain date, causing duplicates. If you are uploading historical data, you'll want to set this as the last date of the transaction you're importing.

Option 3: Import into a manually-managed account first, then merge with a synced account.

You can import historical transactions into a new manually-managed account first to make sure everything looks good before merging with a synced account. You may create the manually-managed account within the Mint migration tool, or from the Accounts page. Once the transactions are imported, click on the manually-managed account and select 'Merge with Synced Account' to complete the merge.

Step 3: Go through the Mint migration tool

The Mint migration tool is part of the CSV importing tool. You can get there by clicking on this link, or by going to the Transactions page and clicking on the import icon button:

In general, importing a CSV consists of the following steps:

Step A: Upload a file

To use the Mint migration tool, select 'Migrate from Mint'.

Step B: Assign columns

This is where you map the columns of your CSV data to relevant columns to import into Lunch Money. For the Mint migration tool, we do this automatically for you and this step is skipped. If you would like to view the columns assigned, you can click 'Back' from the Review Settings step.

The Mint migration tool will import all the columns exported by Mint, which includes:

• Date

• Description (known as 'payee' in Lunch Money)

• Original description (known as 'original name' in Lunch Money)

• Amount

• Amount Type

• Account

• Category

• Notes

• Labels (known as 'tags' in Lunch Money)

Step C: Review settings

Review Notations

As a quick confidence check, double-check to ensure that the date formats and transaction amount notations are correct. This involves ensuring no dates are being converted into "Invalid Date"s, and that debits and credits are properly assigned.

Review Categories

This step will display the list of categories that have been detected within your CSV file. If you have existing categories that match, the tool will map them accordingly. If not, you have the option to:

• create a new category with a different name

• assign to an existing category

• leave blank to create a category of the same name

• leave uncategorized

If you're creating new categories, you'll want to do some more set-up to ensure a smooth transition to Lunch Money.

See FAQ at the end: I've created new categories via the tool. What should I do to ensure compatibility within Lunch Money?

Review Tags

Similar to reviewing categories, this step will display the list of tags that have been detected within your CSV file, If you have existing tags that match, the tool will map them accordingly. If not, you have the option to:

• create a new tag with a different name

• assign to an existing tag

• leave blank to create a tag of the same name

• leave untagged

Important note regarding exporting labels from Mint

When exporting files from Mint, please note that tags are separated by spaces. However, Mint also permits spaces within individual tags, which can complicate accurate parsing of your data.

This CSV import tool assumes multiple tags are delimited by a comma (','). If your transactions involve multiple tags, we strongly advise using a tool like Google Sheets to manually insert commas between each tag to ensure accurate data interpretation in Lunch Money.

Review Accounts

Similar to reviewing categories and tags, this step will display the list of accounts that have been detected within your CSV file. You have the option to:

• assign to an existing account

  • Note that if you want to assign this to a synced account, you'll need to ensure the 'Allow modifications to transactions' setting is enabled from the Accounts page)

• create a new account

  • We recommend this option. Just set the account type and you're good to go! You can modify accounts and add more information later from the Accounts page.

• leave blank to assign transactions to the default 'Cash' account

  • This is the fastest option but we don't recommend it as there will be no way to differentiate your transactions between accounts.

Final Settings

The final step will display the malformed lines in your CSV that will not be imported. This will typically include the first line, which is the header.

You also have the option to run these transactions through our Rules engine, if you have any set up, and to de-duplicate as needed.

Step D: Review Transactions

This step will display the transactions exactly as they will appear when the import tool is finished. Ensure that the data is correct. You also have the option to deselect any transactions if you want to exclude them from the import.

Step E: Import Transactions

If you have over 500 transactions to import, this will be done through a background job and the system will email you within just a few minutes when that's finished. Otherwise, you can go straight to your transactions!

If you are not importing into a synced account, you will also have the option here to update your account balances. You may also skip this step and update the balance anytime from the Accounts page.

Congratulations! You've imported your historical data from Mint to Lunch Money! 🎉

F.A.Q.s

I've imported my historical transactions. How do I get my accounts to sync now?

If you created accounts from the Mint migration tool or CSV import tool, you will see these now from the Accounts page. These created accounts are all manually-managed accounts and are not synced.

To start syncing for these accounts, you'll need to first add a new synced account. The idea is that you will create a new synced account and then merge the associated manually-managed account with your historical transactions into it.

Before you do this, take note of the last date of your imported transactions. This will be the date when your synced account should start importing transactions. This prevents overlap and duplicates. For instance, if you imported historical transactions from Jan 1, 2019 to Aug 13, 2023 into Lunch Money, then your earliest import date will be Aug 13, 2023.

Click on 'Add account' and select 'Auto-import from my bank' from the Accounts page. Go through the Plaid flow to authenticate with your bank. When prompted, deselect 'Import All Available Historical Transactions' and set the earliest import date accordingly:

From there, select your original manually-managed account and select 'Merge with synced account' to complete the process.

I've created new categories via the tool. What should I do to ensure compatibility within Lunch Money?

Set category properties

In Lunch Money, categories are distinguished as being income, or non-income. You may also set other category properties, such as exclude from totals and exclude from budgets. You can read more about category properties here and you can set category properties from the Categories page.

Set-up autocategorization

If you plan to sync transactions automatically from your bank, you'll want to ensure your auto-categorizations are set up properly. This involves mapping your existing categories to Plaid's taxonomy.

Imported transactions include metadata from Plaid including their best-guess as to the category of the transaction. Within Lunch Money, we also have a rules engine where you can create more complex rules to categorize or otherwise modify these transactions. However, auto-categorization is an easy first step to avoid a slew of uncategorized transactions when you start syncing.

To set up auto-categorization, click here or follow the link from the Categories page. Note that the button link only appears if you have actively-syncing accounts.

I'm running into troubles. How do I get support?

Join our community Discord or email us at [e-mail]. We're happy to help!