How do you get your budgeting data into Excel and keep a backup of it?

Why keep your own copy?

Everything you enter is yours. When you delete your account in Settings, your ledger is deleted straight away. If you do not sign in for 12 months, you get an email 30 days before the ledger is deleted. If you ever want to move to another tool, or look back at old spending years later, having your own copy makes it easy.

Taking a copy takes a minute. Downloading one a month and putting it in your cloud drive or on a USB stick is enough for most people. Take a JSON copy before a big clean up as well, such as merging categories or deleting many records; if something goes wrong, you still have the ledger as it was that day.

Which columns are in the CSV file?

Each record is one row, sorted by date from oldest to newest. The columns are Date, Type, Account, Amount, Unit, the equivalent in your main currency (for example "USD equivalent"), Category, Tags and Note. The Type column says Income, Expense, Transfer, Debt or Installment purchase.

Amount is in the account's own unit; spending from a dollar account is written in dollars. The equivalent column converts every record into your main currency, so that is the column to add up when records are in different currencies. Expenses are negative and income is positive. Transfer rows have an equivalent of zero.

The file follows the app's language. In English the columns are separated by commas and the decimal separator is a point. In Turkish the separator is a semicolon and the decimal separator a comma, which is what Turkish Excel expects. The file is saved as UTF-8, so letters such as ş, ğ and ı come through intact.

What can you do with it in Excel?

The most useful tool is a PivotTable. Put Category in rows, Date grouped by month in columns and the equivalent column in values, and you see your spending for the year in one table. Filter the Type column to Expense to keep only spending. Filter the Tags column to get the total of a holiday or a renovation.

Free text such as notes and account names gets an apostrophe in front if it starts with an equals sign, a plus, a minus or @. That stops a note from running as a formula in Excel. Amount columns stay numbers, so you can calculate with them.

What is the JSON file for?

The JSON file is for keeping and moving, not for reading. It holds the whole ledger: accounts, categories, tags, every record, people and their debts, daily wages, recurring payments, installment plans, items, notes, rates and settings. Your password and session key are not written to the file.

The file is your entire financial history, so do not share it. If you keep it in the cloud, make sure two step verification is turned on for that account.

Moving to another ledger

• On the Settings page, press Import a file on the Import from a file card.
• Choose the file you downloaded with All data (JSON). It can be at most 8 MB; database files (.db) are not accepted.
• Importing works only in a new ledger that has no records yet. The accounts and categories in the file replace the ones the ledger started with.

What about backups you do not hold?

Wiozen Ledger backs up its database every day by itself. That backup exists for a failure on our side; it is not a copy you can open whenever you like. When you delete your account, the copy of your ledger leaves the backups as they rotate, within 35 days at most.

When your Pro time ends, nothing is deleted. On the free plan new records go into a single account, your other accounts stay readable and the export buttons keep working.

Which plan includes this?

Export is open on every plan. Pro includes importing from a file. Every new account gets 14 days of Pro without a card; after that Pro is $39.99 a year or $6.99 a month. The free plan has 1 account and 30 records a month. Details are on the pricing page.