Switching from YNAB to DollarAMP

The thing that keeps most people on a budgeting app they have outgrown is not the method. It is the years of history. Switching feels like starting over with a blank register. Moving from YNAB to DollarAMP does not cost you that history — it brings it along.

Your method carries over

If you already budget the zero-based way, you have done the hard part. Category groups, giving every dollar a job, targets on your categories, moving money when life happens — all of it maps one-to-one. Nothing about how you budget has to change. You are changing tools, not habits.

It is the same move as a Fresh Start

If you have ever hit Fresh Start in YNAB, you already know this feeling: a clean budget without throwing away your accounts or your transaction history. Switching to DollarAMP is that same familiar move, done once — except this time your monthly assignments come across too, so there is even less to rebuild on the other side.

Your whole budget comes with you

This is the part people expect to lose. DollarAMP imports directly from YNAB's exports — and it does not stop at transactions. From your YNAB register and budget exports it brings over:

• Accounts and their balances
• Category groups and categories — your structure, intact
• Your monthly assignments, including the available balances that carried forward month to month
• Transactions with dates, payees, memos, and their cleared and reconciled status
• Payees as reusable vendors

You land in a budget that looks like the one you left, not an empty shell you have to rebuild by hand.

What is different

A few things you did not have before:

• Bank linking via Stripe Financial Connections. DollarAMP reads your balances and transactions and drops new ones in as pending for you to approve or reject — it imports and reviews, it does not move money.
• Net worth tracking, built in. Every account rolls up into a monthly assets-minus-liabilities line so you watch the trend, not just this month.
• A cash-flow calendar that plots your scheduled transactions, so a bill due on the 3rd never ambushes you.
• Teal-for-good, magenta-for-alert color language — an overspent category is red on sight, no math required.
• Nine built-in tools — debt snowball, emergency fund, compound interest, and more — that pre-fill from your actual budget data.

Make the switch with confidence

Export both your register and your budget from YNAB, run the import, then spot-check one month you remember well — a month with a big purchase or a tight category. When those numbers match what you remember, you can trust the rest. Most switchers are productive the same day, because the work of years came with them.