The import
What comes across, and what stays behind
What travels, what doesn't, and why — before you upload anything.
Comes across
- Accounts, with their full transaction history
- Category groups and categories
- Monthly assigned amounts
- Transfers, and credit card payment categories
- Cleared and reconciled status
Stays in YNAB
- Targets — YNAB's export leaves them out, so nobody could import them. Rudopo has the same four kinds of target; set them again on the Budget page.
- Scheduled transactions — add them under Recurring
- Flags — transactions import without them
- Closed accounts — every account imports open
- Categories you only used in the past — imported, but hidden
Rules the import follows
Rules the import follows
- It creates a new space. It never merges into an existing budget.
- One currency per space. Two YNAB budgets in two currencies make two spaces.
- You confirm each account's type before anything is written.
- Splits come across as splits wherever Rudopo can hold them the same way. Where it can't, the lines import as separate transactions — the money is identical, the grouping is not.
- Size limit: a ZIP up to 50 MB, with an unzipped register up to 20 MB — roughly 140,000 register rows, more than a decade for a busy household budget. Splits use more than one row each.
How it works
How the import works
Five steps. Nothing becomes yours until you have seen the numbers.
Export from YNAB
In YNAB's web app, set your plan's date format to year-first and numbers to 1,234.56, then choose Export budget. You get a ZIP holding two files: your plan and your transaction history. Upload it exactly as it arrived — if your browser unpacked it, put the two files back into one ZIP first.
Upload the ZIP
Up to 50 MB. Rudopo reads it and shows you what it found: accounts, categories, how many transactions, the date range.
Confirm your accounts
You choose each account's type. Rudopo proposes one and you correct it. Nothing is written until you say so.
Rudopo builds the space
The new space stays invisible while it is being written — it is not in your switcher, and nothing can touch it. A large budget takes a few minutes, and the progress bar shows real counts, not a spinner.
Check the arithmetic, then keep it or remove it
Rudopo re-derives every month's Assigned, Activity, Available and Ready to Assign from the rows it wrote, compares them with your export, and shows you every difference with the reason for it. Keep the import and the space appears. Remove it and it is gone, with its space, and the rest of your account is untouched.
Come back within a day. An import left untouched for longer is discarded along with its unfinished space.
Familiar ground
If you know YNAB, you already know how to drive this.
Rudopo is envelope budgeting, built the same way, with the same words on the screen: Ready to Assign, assigned, activity, available.
Five things that work the same way
Five things that work the same way
Envelopes and Ready to Assign
Give money a job by assigning it to categories. Ready to Assign shows what is still waiting for one.
Rollover and covering overspending
Unspent money rolls into next month. Overspend a category and cover it from another in a click.
Credit card payment categories
Spending on a card moves the budgeted money into that card's payment category, so you can see what is covered.
Targets
A monthly amount, a balance to build or a date to save by — then fund what is needed in one click.
Budget a whole group at once
Assign one amount to a category group and let it cover its categories, or budget category by category. Each group chooses.
Why people move
More than one currency, and no bank in the middle
Your money, in more than one currency.
Hold an account in a currency other than your budget's — 33 carry official rates (the ECB's daily reference rates, and the official US-dollar pegs for the UAE dirham, Saudi riyal and Qatari riyal), and both ends need one. Each foreign transaction is converted at the official rate for its date and stored with the rate it used, so your past never shifts when today's rate moves. Run a rupee budget and a pound budget under one sign-in and see both in one net worth, converted wherever an official rate connects them.
No bank connections. Not a limitation we're apologising for.
Rudopo holds no bank credentials and talks to no aggregator. You enter what happens — type 12.40+6.99 into the amount field and it does the sum — or import a statement: CSV, TSV, TXT, OFX, QFX, QIF, camt.053 XML or PDF. If your bank isn't in anyone's coverage list, that stops being your problem.
Both of these are why the import matters. A budget you can only keep where your bank is supported isn't portable.
The honest part
What YNAB does better
We would rather you knew this from us. YNAB is a good product with a twenty-year head start, and there are things it does that we do not.
| What | YNAB | Rudopo |
|---|---|---|
| Bank connections | Direct import through MX and Plaid, with eighteen European countries listed by name on their support site. | None. You enter transactions, or import a statement file. |
| On your phone | Native iOS and Android apps, with home-screen widgets, including one that adds a transaction without opening the app. | A web app: every screen built for the phone, nothing to install. Native apps are on the roadmap, with no date attached. |
| Trial | 34 days, no card at all. | 30 days, card at checkout, so the trial rolls straight into the plan you chose. Cancel before it ends and you pay nothing. |
| Behind it | A company at this since 2004, a large community, a body of teaching material and an ecosystem of tools. | Launched in 2026. |
| People on one plan | YNAB Together puts up to six people on a single plan. | You and 2 other people, in one shared space. |
Two of these cut both ways. Having no bank connection is the reason some people choose Rudopo and the reason others don't — better to find that out now than after an import. And YNAB's trial is the easier promise; we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Where we think we come out ahead: price — $4/month or $35/year plus tax where it applies, against $14.99/month or $109/year before tax — currencies, and the fact that your data is not travelling through a bank aggregator. And one thing YNAB's own documentation is plain about — you cannot take a YNAB plan back into YNAB. As their support article puts it: "Exporting is a one-way street." We would rather your budget were portable in both directions. That is why this page exists, and why leaving Rudopo is a button.
YNAB figures checked on September 15, 2026, against ynab.com and support.ynab.com. If that date is old, check them again before you rely on them.
Ready when you are
Bring your budget across
Export from YNAB, upload the ZIP, check the numbers, keep it.
One plan with everything included: $4/month or $35/year, plus tax where it applies. 30 days free for new customers · card at checkout · we email you 7 days and 1 day before anything is charged · cancel anytime and pay nothing
Leaving is a button too. Export everything as CSV or a complete JSON backup, any time, and delete your account for good whenever you want.
YNAB is a trademark of its owner. Rudopo is independent and not affiliated with it.