Leaving Monarch Money: What Actually Transfers

The thing nobody tells you about leaving Monarch is that the export is honest about what it is: a transaction register. It has every row you ever categorized, with the merchant, the notes, and the tags you added. What it does not have is the number at the top of each account. Monarch keeps balance history in a separate export, and the transactions file carries no opening balance at all. That single gap explains almost every “my balances are wrong” message after a migration, and it is fixable in about two minutes once you know to expect it.

Nethaven has a dedicated Monarch adapter, so there is no column mapping step. Upload the CSV, and it is recognized by its headers.

Which Monarch file should I export?

For all accounts, open Monarch on desktop and go to Settings > Data > Download Transactions. For one account, use Accounts, select the account, then Edit > Download transactions. Monarch documents a 10,000-transaction download limit and recommends batches of 5,000 or fewer to avoid errors. Check date coverage before importing multiple files. The Monarch instructions also describe a separate balance-history export, which is not the transaction file Nethaven needs.

The columns Nethaven reads are Date, Account, Merchant, Amount, Category, Notes, and Tags. Merchant becomes the transaction name, and Notes and Tags are both carried into the note field, so the context you added by hand comes with you rather than being flattened away.

Upload the file exactly as Monarch produced it. Opening it in Excel or Numbers and saving again rewrites quoting and decimal separators, which is the fastest way to turn a clean export into ambiguous amounts.

What transfers from Monarch to Nethaven?

• Accounts, built from the Account column.
• Transactions, one per row.
• Categories, as named in the export.
• Merchants, notes, and tags, where present.

That is spending history and structure, which is enough to make budgeting in Nethaven useful from day one rather than starting from an empty ledger.

What does not transfer from Monarch?

• Opening balances. Not in the transactions file, so each account starts at zero and its balance becomes the sum of the activity you imported.
• Budget history. Monarch’s transaction export contains no monthly plan, so past budget months cannot be recreated. Only YNAB carries budget history through Nethaven's supported import workflow today.
• Goals and recurring rules. Recreate these in Nethaven, where recurring charges become tracked subscriptions.
• Transfer links. The file does not mark which rows are two halves of one movement.
• Loan payoff details. Payoff tracking needs an original amount and a start date, and no transaction export contains either.

Why are my balances wrong after importing Monarch?

Because the export has no starting point. If an account held $4,000 before your export’s earliest row, Nethaven has no way to know that, so the imported balance is short by exactly that amount.

Nethaven does not hide this. Every imported account is flagged, and the fix is to open accounts after the import and set the real current balance once. From that point the history behind it is correct and the running number is correct.

How are Monarch transfers handled?

A card payment appears in a Monarch export as two unrelated rows: money out of checking, money into the card. Nothing marks them as a pair. Nethaven infers transfers by matching same-day, opposite-sign amounts across two accounts and raises a warning for each one it inferred.

That catches the common case and misses the awkward ones. A payment that posts a day apart, or two payments of the same amount on the same day, can import as ordinary transactions and inflate both your income and expense totals. Those are worth merging or recategorizing after the import, and there are usually only a handful.

What should I check on the preview?

Nothing is written to your account until you confirm, so read the preview properly:

1. Transaction, account, and category counts against Monarch’s own numbers.
2. Per-account balances, all of which will need correcting.
3. Inferred transfer warnings.
4. Guessed account types. The export does not record whether an account is checking, savings, credit, or a loan, so Nethaven infers it from the name and flags each guess.
5. Whether to switch on “Replace my starter data”, which deletes the sample accounts, categories, and budgets from onboarding before applying the import. Leave it off if you already set things up by hand.

What should I do after the import?

Correct the account balances first, since everything else reads off them. Then fix any account types that came in wrong, merge the transfers that imported as two rows, and rebuild your budget categories for the current month. A monthly money review catches whatever is left.

If you are still deciding rather than moving, the Monarch Money alternative page and the Nethaven vs Monarch comparison cover where each app leads.

Use the Monarch import help guide to check Nethaven's preview and limitations. If you are comparing export formats, the Copilot migration guide explains its different fields.

For records from another service, check Rocket Money export limits or saved Mint CSVs before adding them to the same ledger.