I like the look of Cashculator for forecasting and want to use it with Banktivity which is my main financial App. For it to be practical I need to export CSV sheets from Banktivity and import them into Cashculator. I have followed your helpful instruction video and all seems fine: I allocate columns for Date, Description and Amount (there is only one list of numbers, positive for credits and negative for debits), assign Categories for import (and Cashculator remembers very well from sheet to sheet), but when I click import it seems to import Income (which Banktivity puts at the top of the CSV export), but it will only import one of the expenses (which is a refund, so a positive value).
I have been into the CSV file and removed the header rows for expenses, which Banktivity puts below the income, in case this is the problem, but it isn’t, and I have tried selecting all expenses with the column header set to Expenses, but this doesn’t help either.
Is there a problem with importing negative values? Or is this operator error or something about the format of the CSV file?
@Hounslow Hi, and welcome to the forum. What you explain how you did it (with selecting the column to say “Amounts”), sounds like the right approach for a one-column amount column with negative values meaning expenses. So it should work as you expect. That being said, it may be helpful for me to see what actually happens and what the CSV looks like.
Have you tried importing this like you explain without even assigning any categories? Try this is on a new empty Cashculator document, so that it doesn’t pollute your current one and also makes it easier to see what’s imported. Do you see a new Unsorted row in both income and expenses Actuals with transactions in them?
I have done as you suggested and it seems that the issue might be that the Amount column in the CSV file is recognised as currency. I don’t know whether this is related to me banking in pounds sterling and Cashcalulator expecting dollars. I don’t know why its happy to accept income in sterling but not expenditure.However, if I change the column format to numbers and then import, it works as expected.
Anyway it looks as if I can get around the problem. Thank you for your help. Also a shout out to the folk at Under My Roof who pointed me in your direction,
@Hounslow Thank you for the explanation and how you fixed it.
Could you share a line of the CSV with the negative amount in it so that we can see why it fails?
Feel free to change the actual amount and description and any other personal information, we only care about the structure.
The Banktivity output for an expense line looks like this (in a text file):
29/01/2024,ALDI STORES LTD FAREHAM GBR,Groceries,Marks and Spencer Visa,-ÂŁ46.38
By default in my system the CSV will open in Numbers and the format of the cell with the negative number is correctly automatically detected as currency. If I change the format to Number, the pound sign is suppressed. I then export to CSV again and can then import it into Cashculator.