Guide
How to import bank and credit card statements into Monarch
Monarch Money can import transactions into a bank or credit card account from a CSV file, on the web app only. Its CSV import needs a date and a signed amount on every row. This page covers a Monarch CSV import for a bank account and a credit card account: the file Monarch expects, what changes for a card, the errors that stop an import, and a recorded walkthrough of the whole thing. MatchLedger reads your statement from a PDF, CSV or Excel file. It then writes the CSV that Monarch imports. See how MatchLedger works.
Recorded September 2026
What the walkthrough says
Recorded September 2026
- From bank statement to categorized transactions, with no manual entry. MatchLedger extracts your statement and exports it in a Monarch-ready format, so Monarch can import and categorize it for you. Click to get started.
- Upload your bank statement to get started.
- Select your statement file.
- Click Upload. MatchLedger takes it from here.
- Feel free to close this. We'll email you when it's ready.
- First off, click Export Transactions to download the extracted transaction data.
- Next, select your accounting software from the dropdown menu to proceed with export.
- After that, select Monarch Personal Finance - Bank to export transactions to this software.
- Afterwards, click the Download button to export your transactions as a CSV file.
- With the CSV downloaded from MatchLedger, switch over to Monarch and select Accounts.
- From the list below, select the account you'd like to upload the CSV into.
- Click Edit. That's where you'll find the Import transactions option.
- Select Import transactions to bring in the CSV you exported earlier from MatchLedger.
- Click the upload zone to pick the file and drop it in.
- After that, click the Next button to proceed with mapping your CSV columns.
- Take a look. The columns are already mapped correctly, so there's nothing left to fix here.
- Go ahead and hit that button to continue to the following step.
- Simply click Next to proceed.
- Feel free to change any category on this table, or just move ahead. These are already coming from your exported CSV.
- As an example, let's swap out the category assigned to this particular transaction.
- Go ahead and click Next.
- This pulls in everything from your CSV without touching what's already in Monarch.
- Click Import 6 transactions to finish bringing in your CSV data.
- Now click View transactions to see everything that came in.
- Here's the transaction you just brought in from your CSV.
- If you've already set up a rule before uploading this statement, it gets applied automatically, no manual categorization needed.
- Whatever category you assigned during the CSV mapping step gets carried over and applied here too.
- Didn't set a category during mapping? You can set it manually here or already happy with the category shown? No need to change a thing. It's already the one MatchLedger tagged when it read your bank statement, carried straight over into the CSV export.
- And that's it. Once your transactions are categorized, you're done. Monarch doesn't have a separate reconciliation step. Categorizing is all you need.
- Now your entire statement is categorized in Monarch. Rules applied automatically, any leftover transactions confirmed with a click, even across hundreds or thousands of them. That's MatchLedger: from bank statement to accurate books, in minutes instead of hours.
The file Monarch accepts
| What | What Monarch needs | What MatchLedger's export writes |
|---|---|---|
| File type | A CSV file, imported on the web app. The mobile app does not import files. | A CSV file. Several statements at once come back as a ZIP with one CSV per statement. |
| Columns | Date and Amount are required, plus Account unless you start the import from that account's own page. Category, Tags and Notes are optional. Columns can be in any order: Monarch maps them by their headings and ignores any it does not use. | Eight comma-separated columns with a heading row: Date, Merchant, Category, Account, Original Statement, Notes, Amount, Tags. Category carries the category MatchLedger gave each transaction when it read the statement, where it gave one. Account holds the bank or card name and its last four digits. |
| Amount sign | Debits and credits in one Amount column. A purchase or withdrawal carries a minus sign or sits in parentheses, and a deposit or credit carries no symbol. | Bank: withdrawals negative, deposits positive. Card: charges negative, payments and credits positive. |
| Date format | Any standard US date format, such as 12/01/24 or December 1, 2024. | MM/DD/YYYY for a statement written month first. A statement written day first exports as YYYY-MM-DD, which Monarch's help does not list, so test that import with a small file first. |
| Limits | No published row or size limit. A file Monarch finds too big fails with a File too large error. An import cannot be undone, only bulk-deleted afterwards. | One CSV per statement, so each file covers one statement period. |
Pick Monarch when you export from MatchLedger and the file comes out in this shape, with headings Monarch maps on its own. Both of its Monarch exports, bank and card, are marked Verified in the app, each checked with a live import into Monarch. See the supported exports.
Importing a credit card statement
- It goes into a credit card account. A card is a liability, so its statement belongs in a credit card account, not a bank account. In Monarch the card is an account of its own, a liability that counts against your net worth. Start the CSV import from the card's own page so every row lands in it.
- The signs flip. On a card, a charge increases what you owe and a payment reduces it, the opposite of a bank account, and Monarch expects its own convention for which is which. Monarch reads a card file by the same rule as a bank file: a purchase is negative and a credit positive. On the card, a charge is negative and a payment or refund positive.
- A card payment is a transfer. The payment leaves your bank account and arrives on the card, so it shows up on both statements. Match it once as a transfer, rather than booking it twice as an expense and as income. Monarch treats a card payment as a transfer. Give both sides, the payment out of your bank account and the payment into the card, its Credit Card Payment category, which stays out of your budget and spending totals, so the original purchase is not counted twice.
MatchLedger's Monarch card export writes charges as negative amounts and payments as positive ones. A live import into a Monarch credit card account brought every charge in as spend and every payment and refund as a credit. See the export formats.
Inbox to Monarch: extract a card statement with Claude Code. The same Monarch CSV from the terminal: Claude Code finds the card statement in Gmail and MatchLedger extracts it, ready to import.
Common Monarch import errors
Can I import a PDF bank statement into Monarch Money?
Not directly. Monarch imports transactions from a CSV file, so a statement that only exists as a PDF has to become a CSV first. MatchLedger reads the PDF and writes a CSV in the shape Monarch imports, bank or card.
Why does Monarch say my CSV is missing a required column?
Monarch needs a Date and an Amount column in every file, and an Account column too when the import does not start from that account's own page. If one is missing or appears twice, the importer asks you to fix the file. Debits and credits must share the one Amount column, so a file with separate debit and credit columns has to be combined first. MatchLedger's Monarch export already has Date, Account and a single signed Amount.
Why did my Monarch CSV import create duplicate transactions?
At the end of an import Monarch asks what to do with transactions it already has. Import all brings in every row of the CSV and can duplicate any it already had for those dates. Prioritize CSV replaces everything in the account between the file's first and last dates with the file. Prioritize Monarch keeps what is there and imports only the older rows. An import cannot be undone, so remove duplicates by bulk-deleting them, and choose the overlap option before you import the next file.
Why are my credit card charges showing up as credits in Monarch?
The file signs them the other way round, with charges positive, and Monarch reads an amount with no minus sign as a credit. Bulk-delete the imported rows, then import a file where every charge is negative and every payment positive. MatchLedger's card export writes charges as negative, and a live import into a Monarch credit card account brought every charge in as spend and every payment and refund as a credit.
What do I do when Monarch says File too large?
Split the file. Monarch suggests one CSV per account first, and if a single account's file is still too big, one file per date range, such as a year or six months. MatchLedger already writes one CSV per statement, so each file covers one statement period.
Imported is not the same as reconciled
An import checks the shape of the file, not whether it holds every transaction the statement lists. Once the month is in Monarch, reconcile the ledger back against the statement itself, so a missing or duplicated transaction shows up before you close the month rather than after. Extraction gets the data in. Reconciliation is what lets you say the month is right. See how MatchLedger does both.
Turn your bank and credit card statements into a CSV for Monarch, then reconcile the month against the statement.
Start FreeOnly one statement to do? Convert it with the free converter.