YNAB4 Converter Tool [alpha]

[Joel]

@RPNnerd @machei - Can you log onto the dropbox website and identify and download the specific .yfull file you need (similar to the instructions for a Windows user)?

When I look at my Dropbox folder for YNAB, I don't see any files with a .yfull extension. There's only .ynab4 file. The question was whether this file was an archive, and this morning I checked it out and indeed, it is. It contains a lot of things. Multiple backups, scores of .ydiff files, and a number of nested folders. Many of these folders do indeed contain, among other things, a budget.yfull file. However, in my case ALL of them are not recent. The time stamps go back months, and in some cases years for the .yfull files. Anything with a date matching my latest save (which I assume are the ones within the past couple hours) do not contain any .yfull files that I can locate to this point.

But I haven't had chance to look deeply. I wasn't even going to do this much this morning, as I'm strapped for time. I will look again this evening.

Thanks!
m.

I was recommending accessing the folder from Dropbox's website since Macs may do weird stuff, but it sounds like you found it.

To figure out which .yfull file you should use, I recommend taking note of what data# folders you have. (For example, data1, data2, data3). Open ynab4 and save a version. That should create a new data# folder. If you use the .yfull file in the new folder it should have all your data.

[Joel]

@jeremiahsvow - I think you are correct that all of these files are hidden by default.

[machei]

@RPNnerd @machei - Can you log onto the dropbox website and identify and download the specific .yfull file you need (similar to the instructions for a Windows user)?

When I look at my Dropbox folder for YNAB, I don't see any files with a .yfull extension. There's only .ynab4 file. The question was whether this file was an archive, and this morning I checked it out and indeed, it is. It contains a lot of things. Multiple backups, scores of .ydiff files, and a number of nested folders. Many of these folders do indeed contain, among other things, a budget.yfull file. However, in my case ALL of them are not recent. The time stamps go back months, and in some cases years for the .yfull files. Anything with a date matching my latest save (which I assume are the ones within the past couple hours) do not contain any .yfull files that I can locate to this point.

But I haven't had chance to look deeply. I wasn't even going to do this much this morning, as I'm strapped for time. I will look again this evening.

Thanks!
m.

I was recommending accessing the folder from Dropbox's website since Macs may do weird stuff, but it sounds like you found it.

To figure out which .yfull file you should use, I recommend taking note of what data# folders you have. (For example, data1, data2, data3). Open ynab4 and save a version. That should create a new data# folder. If you use the .yfull file in the new folder it should have all your data.

That's a good suggestion. I'll give it a shot this evening and report back (and I'll also make a point of looking for hidden files). Thank you for this suggestion!

m.

[machei]

Success!

I managed to get it to go on my Mac. Here was my process:

• Went to dropbox folder and located most recent .ynab budget file (had today's date)
• Duplicated the file (I did this for safety's sake... more often than once I've moved a file rather than copying it, making a pretty big mess)
• Moved the duplicated file to the desktop to work with
• Right click file - show package contents
• Search package file for .yfull files (I did this because I could not find a .yfull file with today's date by eyeballing it; this may be because it was hidden, or it may just be stuffed into a nested folder out of sight. I'm sure there's other ways to find this file, but this worked for me)
• Check date stamp of the .yfull file. It should be today
• Use the ynab->Financier converter on this file as instructed. (FWIW, I could not get this to work using Safari, I had to use Chrome)
• Load up the budget to Financier and there it is.

It worked swimmingly once I found the right file and used Chrome. So, now I have my happy path and can convert at will.

Thanks to everyone who offered advice! 
m.

[Paul]

Excellent - thank you. Worked for me too!

PS A YNAB 4 file for 2008-2011 converted without going through this process though.

[John]

Just imported my most recent version of YNAB (2+ years of data) in less than a minute.

So far everything looks good. Awesome Job @Alex!

[bronhi]

I'm finally free from the holiday obligations/chaos, and making progress on the nYNAB converter again. Attempting to get something functional wrapped up by the end of the day.

Just wanted to check what the status on the nYNAB converter is? Would like to convert my 1 year old data from nYNAB to financier.

Thanks for working on this!

[asromzek]

I'm finally free from the holiday obligations/chaos, and making progress on the nYNAB converter again. Attempting to get something functional wrapped up by the end of the day.

Just wanted to check what the status on the nYNAB converter is? Would like to convert my 1 year old data from nYNAB to financier.

Thanks for working on this!

I found a weird bug right before I was going to upload the code, and life started smacking me around. I'm going to sort that out this week...

[fshelton79]

Just did this for kicks.  I had to remove a couple of odd master categories that were empty, but other than that, everything looks as expected.  Now it will be even easier to move use this full time once you have scheduled transactions in place!

[MD]

Used the "Converter Tool" this morning and imported 3 years worth of data from YNAB 4...it worked perfectly. 

Thanks for the outstanding effort in designing this tool.   

[asromzek]

Alright, it's time to make the nYNAB importer work for real. Our trial for YNAB expired again, and I need to get the exported budget for my wife's business into Financier. Stay tuned...

[zielperson]

Please.

Only thing keeping me from converting the family main account at the moment...

::zielperson::

[asromzek]

Right now the converter is definitely clunky, and I'm sort of blind now that I can't compare the import to the original nYNAB budget. I'll keep chipping away at it as much as possible this week. (Life is doing it's best to kick me around right now...)

I uploaded the current code to Gitlab last night. There are no instructions, it's a little rough around the edges, and there are some definite bugs to be worked out, so use at your own risk. If you're not the adventurous type, then waiting until it's a little polished might be a good idea.

If you are going to test, I recommend logging out and clearing local budgets in Financier before importing a converted budget. That will keep your account from getting clogged up with synced test budgets that aren't totally deleted when you delete them. If you know your way around C#, feel free to fix the bugs for me.

[asromzek]

And the link to the Gitlab project: https://gitlab.com/asromzek/ynac

[asromzek]

YNAC.Converter is the Winforms project within the solution for converting nYNAB budgets. It uses the YNAC.Financier library to building the JSON budget file.