Skip to main content

Migrating from nYNAB

In order to export your budget from YNAB, you will need to use one of two methods.

3rd Party nYnab Exporter​

This is the easiest method available. While we don't maintain this tool, https://json-exporter-for-ynab.netlify.app will handle authorizing with your account to export your nYNAB budget into JSON.

Export Using API Key​

If you don't want to use a third party tool, you will need an API key.

If you haven't already got an API key, you'll need to:

Sign in to the YNAB web app
Go to the "Account Settings" page, then to the "Developer Settings" page
Under the "Personal Access Tokens" section, click "New Token"
Enter your password and click "Generate" to get a new access token
caution

The API key is only shown once, so make sure you copy it down somewhere! More information on how to access the YNAB API can be found at https://api.youneedabudget.com/

Now open a terminal window / command prompt, and enter:

note

If you receive an error message like: Invoke-WebRequest : Cannot bind parameter 'Headers', this is because curl is probably aliased to the "Invoke-WebRequest" Powershell commandlet. Use curl.exe instead of just curl in the commands below to fix this.

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer <ACCESS_TOKEN>" https://api.youneedabudget.com/v1/budgets

This will get the list of all the budgets you have. You'll need to find the id of the budget you want to export and use it to perform the following API request:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer <ACCESS_TOKEN>" https://api.youneedabudget.com/v1/budgets/<BUDGET ID> --output budget.json

Import the JSON File​

  • Open Actual
  • Select the drop down menu and Close File
  • Select Import file
  • Select nYnab
  • Choose the exported json file