How to move your history from Spendee
Spendee's export is straightforward with two things worth knowing: a note can contain line breaks, which confuses simple readers, and both halves of a transfer are written as ordinary income and expense rows.
How to bring it in
- 1. Export your history from Spendee. Either the CSV or the XLSX works.
- 2. Open Money Talks, go to Settings and tap Import Data.
- 3. Choose Spendee from the list of apps.
- 4. Pick the file you exported.
- 5. Read the preview. Transfers are listed as skipped on purpose, with their dates, so you can note them before you confirm.
- 6. Confirm, then add the transfers by hand.
The file you need
Spendee exports a CSV or an XLSX file.
You have the right file if its first line looks like this:
Date,Wallet,Type,"Category name",Amount,Currency,Note,Labels,AuthorAmounts are signed here: an expense is negative. The Type column says the same thing again, and for transfers it says so explicitly.
Frequently asked questions
Why are my Spendee transfers skipped?
Because Spendee books each half of an internal move as an ordinary row: an expense on one wallet and income on the other. Importing both would count the same money twice, once as spending and once as earnings, and nothing in the file marks the two rows as a pair. Money Talks lists them in the preview so you can add them once by hand afterwards.
One of my notes runs across several lines in the file. Is it damaged?
No. Spendee keeps line breaks you typed inside a note, and the CSV format allows that as long as the field is quoted, which it is. It does break tools that read a file line by line, which is why a Spendee export sometimes looks like it has more rows than it does. Money Talks reads the file properly and keeps the note as you wrote it.
Should I export CSV or XLSX?
Either. Money Talks reads both and the contents are the same. The XLSX avoids any question about how your computer handles the file, so if you are unsure, take that one.
Do the amounts keep their direction?
Yes. Spendee writes expenses as negative numbers and income as positive, and repeats the direction in the Type column. Money Talks reads both, so nothing arrives with the sign flipped.
What comes across from Spendee
- Every income and expense with its date and note, line breaks included
- Categories
- The currency on each row, so a multi-currency history stays multi-currency
- The wallet each transaction came from, as the account name
What does not come across
- Transfers between your own wallets - Spendee writes both halves as ordinary rows, so importing them would count the same money as an expense and as income. Nothing in the pair says the two belong together, so Money Talks lists them in the preview rather than guessing.
- Labels - Money Talks has no tags. Notes come across in full.
- Author - Spendee records who added a row in a shared wallet. Money Talks tracks that through its own shared spaces rather than as a field on a transaction.
- Your wallets themselves - Each transaction remembers the wallet name it came from, and the preview lists the names it found. Money Talks does not recreate the accounts or their balances.
Notes that span several lines
Type a note in Spendee, press return in the middle of it, and the line break is kept when you export. The CSV format allows this: the field is wrapped in quotes, and everything inside the quotes belongs to one value even across a line break.
It matters because the obvious way to read a CSV is one line at a time, and that approach turns a single transaction with a two-line note into two broken rows. This is the usual reason a Spendee export appears to have more rows than the app showed you, or why the last few columns look shifted.
Money Talks parses the file as a real CSV, so a multi-line note stays one note on one transaction, exactly as you typed it.
Transfers are written twice
When you move money between two Spendee wallets, the export contains two ordinary
rows: an expense on the wallet the money left, and income on the wallet it
reached. The Type column says transfer, but the two rows do not reference each
other.
Import both as written and the same money is counted twice: once as spending, once as earnings. A month with a single 5,000 transfer to savings shows 5,000 more spending and 5,000 more income than really happened, and every chart that separates the two is wrong.
Pairing them automatically means guessing, and a guess here creates a movement between two wallets that may not be the ones involved. So Money Talks skips them, counts them, and shows them in the preview with their dates before you confirm.
Note that list, import the rest, and re-enter the transfers once. It is usually a short list, because transfers tend to be a few repeated habits rather than many one-off moves.