What this guide will cover

When dealing with real bank accounts it is often much faster to download the transactions from your online banking and import them into MoneyWiz. This can save you a great deal of time especially if you are not entering your transactions on a daily basis, but you prefer to update your finances less often.

MoneyWiz allows you to import bank statements in the five most popular formats: OFX (Open Financial Exchange), QFX (Quicken Financial Exchange), QIF (Quicken Interchange Format), CSV (comma-separated values) and MT940. It is very likely that your online banking will allow export in at least one of these formats.

Please note that MoneyWiz can also import your transactions automatically as they happen thanks to Online Accounts.

Table of contents

1. Exporting your statement
   1. From a bank
   2. From another application
2. Importing the file into MoneyWiz
   1. Before you begin importing 
   2. On Mobile
   3. On Desktop
3. Working with the Import wizard
   1. Match CSV fields
   2. Select Date format
   3. Link Accounts
   4. Link Payees
   5. Link Categories
   6. Transaction duplicates detection

       

Exporting your statement

From a bank

Each bank’s online banking system handles this situation differently, but the following practices apply to most of the cases:

• You will need to login into your online banking with your own username, password and other forms of identification which your bank requires.
• When you see your bank statement, there should be an export button, in most of the cases it is located below the bank statement itself, and in other cases you will find it in the left side menu.
• When you click on this button, it is highly probable that you will be provided with several choices – you will need to select the format of your bank statement.

If none of these options is available, you may need to contact your bank account manager and ask if at least one of these options is available. It is also likely that your account manager can give you instructions how to export bank statements.

Please note that some online banking systems allow you to download exported files on mobile devices as well. However, if this option is not available for your bank, download the exported file using a desktop computer.

From another application

We have guides available for how to export your data file from various apps. To see if your application is listed please check this section.

If your application is not listed, please contact us as we might be able to help.

Importing the file into MoneyWiz

Before you begin importing

Please remember that it's important that you first create the accounts you wish to import transactions into. MoneyWiz will not do this automatically during import as it needs account names, account balances and account types. So please first create all accounts that the file contains transactions for. You can use the Account basics guide for reference.

On Mobile

To import the file in MoneyWiz, please first access it (from bank's website or your favourite file management application) and find the function to "open" the file in MoneyWiz or "copy" it there.

You can also use File Sharing to place the file into MoneyWiz's memory and then you'll see it visible in MoneyWiz Settings -> Import.

You can also copy the contents of the file you wish to import to clipboard and import it using Settings -> Import -> Import from clipboard.

On Desktop

There are several ways of importing the file on Desktop:

• Mac and Windows: drag the file onto MoneyWiz's window.
• Mac: go to File menu bar item at the top of the screen -> Import.
• Windows: click on the button in the left navigation bar that resembles a square with arrow pointing inwards.

Once the file is loaded and you start the import, you'll see the Import wizard appear.

Working with the Import wizard

Import wizard will ask you several questions and will have several stages, depending on the file type.

Match CSV fields

When importing a CSV file, MoneyWiz will also ask you to determine how the fields in the CSV file would relate to the transaction properties in MoneyWiz. You should be careful with that part as many banks would export all kinds of information like codes you don’t use, or numbers that have no meaning for you. In any case you should not link those, but make sure you have mapped at least the Date, the Amount and the Payee or Description.

If you are having trouble with this part, you might want to check if you can reformat your CSV file according to our guidelines.

Select Date format

MoneyWiz recognises many date formats but sometimes it might need some help. For example, with dates like 6/6/2018, is this mm/dd/yyyy or dd/mm/yyyy? If MoneyWiz cannot figure out the date format without your help, it'll show you a couple of transactions and ask you to select the correct date format used throughout the file.

Link Accounts

MoneyWiz will list all the accounts it has found transactions for inside the file and ask you to link those accounts with accounts in your MoneyWiz database. Please note, as indicated in the Before you begin importing section, you need to create those accounts before importing.

During this stage simply link the accounts on the left with respective accounts on the right.

Link Payees

In most cases bank statements contain the name of the payee and other information which describes the person or company which you were paid by or you paid to. You can link the payees found in the bank statement file to your MoneyWiz payees or you can create new payees.

Once you link these payees, the next time you import a file which contains information for some or all of them, by default MoneyWiz will have them pre-selected the same way you configured the last time. It will ask you how to link only for newly found payees.

If there are no payees found in the bank statement file, this phase will not appear.

Link Categories

It is rarely the case for banking institutions to include categorization in the exported bank statement file, but if you exported your data using a financial software it is very likely that categorization will be included. In that case you will be asked to link the categories found in the file you are importing to already existing categories in MoneyWiz. You will be given the option to create new categories as well.

Note that if you select the Create New Category option, the category will be created with a question ? mark icon. It may be worth going through all new categories to change their icons to something more meaningful. See Managing Categories guide.

Once you link these categories, the next time you import a file which contains information for some or all of them, by default MoneyWiz will have them pre-selected the same way you configured the last time. It will ask you how to link only for newly found categories.

If there is no categorization in the bank statement file, on this phase you will be asked to link the payees to your existing categories. This will help you have your transactions properly categorized right after you import them.

You can select a proper category for all payees found in the file you are importing or you can leave them Not Linked. If you select the latest, the imported transactions will not be categorized.

These links are also saved so the next time you import a bank statement, the app will automatically suggest you to use the same categorisation.

Transaction duplicates detection

MoneyWiz checks all transactions you wish to import against already existing transactions and in case it finds possible duplicates it will ask you what to do. This can happen for a number of reasons, for example:

• you are trying to import the same bank statement file for the second time or,
• you have imported all transactions for September and you are trying to import a bank statement which includes transaction from 25 Sep to 25 Oct for example. In this case transactions that appear between 25 and 30 Sep can be duplicated or you can skip them or,
• you are importing the two accounts which participate in the same transfer transaction.

These phases will not appear if MoneyWiz can recognize the format of the dates and there are no duplicate transactions. After you set everything MoneyWiz will start importing all transactions that are listed in the file you selected for import.