YNAB export: a full guide
Your budget is your record of your own money. Here is exactly what comes out of YNAB when you ask for it back, and what each column means.
People usually look this up at a particular moment: they have decided to leave, or they are doing their taxes, or they have just realised that years of their own financial history live somewhere they do not control. The question underneath all three is the same — can I get it out, and is what comes out any use?
Short answer: yes, and yes. Here is what to expect.
Where the export is
Exporting is a web app job. Sign in on a computer rather than reaching for the phone app — YNAB’s own help pages for exporting describe the web app, and that is where the menu item lives.
Open the plan you want, then click its name at the top of the left sidebar. That name is a menu, which is the part people miss: it does not look like one. In the drop-down you will find Export Plan.
If the menu says Export Budget instead, nothing is wrong — YNAB renamed budgets to plans, and which word you see depends on when you are reading this. The item is in the same place either way. YNAB’s own page on it is Exporting Plan Data in YNAB, and it is worth a glance because their labels move and this article does not.
There is a second export worth knowing about: select some transactions in the register and you are offered Export n Transactions, which gives you just those. Useful at tax time, no use at all for moving house.
What you get
Two files, named after the plan and the day you asked:
My Budget as of 2026-08-15 - Register.csv
My Budget as of 2026-08-15 - Budget.csvTwo files is all there is. They are comma-separated, or tab-separated for
currencies that use a comma as the decimal separator — the extension may still
say .csv, so if a spreadsheet opens it as one long column, that is why. Tell
the import dialog the separator is a tab.
Register.csv — every transaction
One row per transaction. These are the columns that carry the history, and the ones our own importer reads by name:
| Column | What is in it |
|---|---|
| Account | The account name as you typed it |
| Date | The transaction date |
| Payee | Who it went to |
| Category Group | The group the category sits in |
| Category | The category |
| Category Group/Category | Both, joined — a convenience column |
| Memo | Your note |
| Outflow | Money out, as a positive number |
| Inflow | Money in, as a positive number |
| Cleared | Uncleared, Cleared or Reconciled |
Your file may carry more columns than these — YNAB has added some over the years. That is not a problem for anything that looks columns up by their heading rather than by counting from the left, which is worth knowing if you are writing a formula: insert a column upstream and position-based formulas break silently.
Three things about that table catch people out.
Outflow and Inflow are two columns, not one signed one. A spend is a
positive number in Outflow and an empty or zero Inflow. If you are summing this
in a spreadsheet, you want Inflow − Outflow, not a sum of one column. Anything
that reads the file has to do the same, and an importer that reads only one of
them will be wrong about half your history.
Transfers appear twice, once from each side, and the payee reads
Transfer : Some Account. That is not a payee called Transfer — it is the other
end of the move. Sum the file naively and transfers count twice; treat the two
rows as one movement and the totals come out right.
Dates in the exports we have worked with are month/day/year. Check yours before a spreadsheet quietly reads 03/04 as the fourth of March.
Budget.csv — what you assigned, month by month
One row per category per month:
| Column | What is in it |
|---|---|
| Month | The month, like Aug 2026 |
| Category Group | The group |
| Category | The category |
| Budgeted | What you assigned to it that month |
| Activity | What moved through it that month |
| Available | What was left at the end of it |
This is the half people forget to keep. The register says what you spent; this file says what you had decided, month after month, which is the actual record of how you have been budgeting. If you only keep one file, keep both.
What to do with it once you have it
Keep a copy somewhere that is not a budgeting app. Two CSV files are small enough to live in the same folder as your tax records, and they will still open in thirty years, which is not something anyone can say about an account on a service.
Open it in a spreadsheet before you trust anything else with it. Sort the register by date and look at the oldest rows: that is where truncation and date-format mistakes show up first.
If you are moving to another app, expect to check its arithmetic. Any importer is somebody’s reading of a file format, including ours. The question to ask a new app is not “can it import YNAB” — everything says yes — but “will it show me what it made of my numbers before it commits them?”
Bringing it into Fundkeep
That last question is one we have to answer about ourselves, so: Fundkeep reads both files, rebuilds your categories, accounts and history from them, and then shows a reconciliation report — what YNAB said each balance was, what Fundkeep makes it, and every difference it found. You read the differences and decide. Nothing is saved until you do.
We would rather show you a list of disagreements than a green tick, because a green tick from an importer is a claim, and a list of differences is evidence.
If you want the rest of it — what Fundkeep is, what it costs, and what you give up by moving — that is on the page for people leaving YNAB. And whatever you decide, take the export. It is your record either way.