expenseRegister Help - Import Expenses from an Excel or CSV File

Import Expenses from an Excel or CSV File

Import Expenses

Let's look at the steps to import expenses from an Excel spreadsheet or a CSV file.

First, if your expenses are in an Excel spreadsheet as an xls or xlsx file, you have to convert that to a csv file. To do so, open your file in Excel, go to the File menu and click Save As, in the file dialog, pick file type as csv (or Comma Separated Values) and click Save. Now you have your expenses in a csv file; below are steps to import this csv file into expenseRegister.

Step 1

Expenses Page

Step 2

Click the button shown below to initiate your csv file import.

Import CSV

Step 3

Choose the file you want to import. And click the Import button.
This file picker will look slightly different in different browsers, but you'll have a button to open file explorer and pick your expenses file.

Import CSV

Step 4

Now, we map our csv columns to the right expenseRegister fields to import the expenses correctly. The expenses in your spreadsheet should at least have a date, description and the amount.
In the Data Mapping section of this screen, for the expenseRegister field listed on the left, pick the right spreadsheet column name on the right.
In the example below, I mapped the Date field to the Date column, the Description field to the Expense column and Amount field to the Amount column.
If you had a column in your spreadsheet with the expense type, map that to the Type field. If not, expenseRegister will try to automatically categorize the expense and fill in a type.

Map CSV Data

Step 5

Click the Import button to import your expenses.

Step 6

Once the import is done, you should see the list of expenses you just imported with a summary of the number of expenses imported. Expenses with errors won't be imported and this screen will tell you about the errors.

You can edit your expenses here to fix any minor errors. Notice that expenseRegister filled in the types for the expenses. This might not work well the first couple times and you can edit your expense right here to key in the right type. Over time, the type matching gets accurate.

That's it. There are a few features we skipped in this article to keep it simple. This is really all you need to import spreadsheets. The additional features should be easy to discover and use; if not let us know, we'll fix it!