Fresh Start Transaction Copier for You Need A Budget (YNAB)

Have you ever wanted to play around with your YNAB categories, re-categorizing some of your transactions just to see how it would work? YNAB’s Fresh Start only copies over the categories and accounts, but doesn’t bring the transactions over so it is hard to do this without risking messing up your existing budget.

This tool can help!

This tool copies the transactions from one budget to a new budget, containing all the transactions into a single “migration” account. When you run this tool, the new budget must be a “Fresh Start” of the old one with all the same groups and categories but once the tool has run and the transactions are are copied over, you can re-categorize and experiment to your hearts content!

See YNAB’s documentation about creating a fresh start

A new cash account will be created named “CHECK OUT MY BUDGET Migration account” which will:

• Have a final balance of zero
• Not have a copy of transfers, manual reconciliations, starting budgets, etc…
• Will track transfers between on and off budget accounts but not between 2 on budget accounts
• Possibly duplicate some of the transactions if the fresh start budget has imported some transactions that the original budget has. If this happens, delete the transaction in “CHECK OUT MY BUDGET Migration account” and modify the starting balance accordingly.

Known Issues:

• When the original budget has uncategorized transactions, YNAB may attempt to auto assign a category to it as it is being migrated over.

If anything goes wrong, You can delete the account created by this tool once you delete all the transactions contained in it.

Please report any bugs on our community page.