Short answer: yes. EveryDollar won’t hand you an .xlsx workbook, but you can get your budget and every transaction out as CSV files, and Excel opens CSV natively. Once it’s in Excel, a single pivot table gives you spending by category and month, which is the view most people are after when they ask.
This guide covers getting the files, opening them so Excel doesn’t mangle anything, and turning them into a summary you can actually read.
Step 1: Get your data out as CSV
The quickest route is the free EveryDollar CSV Exporter, a Chrome extension we built for this. Open your EveryDollar budget, choose how many months to go back, and start the export. It scrolls the whole transaction list so older transactions aren’t skipped, reads each split transaction, and downloads two files:
everydollar-transactions-….csv, one row per transactioneverydollar-budget-….csv, one row per budget item per month, with planned amounts
It runs in your browser, needs no account, and sends nothing to us. If you’d rather use EveryDollar’s own export, that works too, though what it includes depends on your plan. Our EveryDollar export guide compares the two routes.
Here are the columns you’ll be working with in the transactions file:
| Column | What’s in it |
|---|---|
| Date | YYYY-MM-DD |
| Merchant | The payee, as EveryDollar shows it |
| Amount | A positive number with two decimals, no $ |
| Type | income or expense |
| Category | The budget item. For a split, the first item |
| Splits | Every part of a split, like Groceries $80.00, Household $40.00 |
| Note | Any note you wrote on the transaction |
Step 2: Open the CSV in Excel without double-clicking it
Double-clicking a CSV works, but Excel guesses at every column as it goes. It can read dates in the wrong order on some regional settings, and if a merchant name happens to start with =, +, - or @, Excel treats it as a formula. Importing takes thirty seconds longer and avoids both problems.
- Open a blank workbook.
- Go to Data → From Text/CSV (on older versions, Data → Get Data → From File → From Text/CSV) and pick the transactions file.
- In the preview, click Transform Data.
- Select every column and set Data Type → Text. Then set Date to Date and Amount to Decimal Number.
- Click Close & Load.
You now have a proper Excel table. Name it something short: click inside it, go to Table Design, and type Tx in the Table Name box. The formulas below use that name.
On Google Sheets the equivalent is File → Import → Upload, with “Convert text to numbers, dates, and formulas” turned off.
Step 3: Add a signed amount and a month column
The export keeps every amount positive and puts the direction in the Type column. That’s unambiguous, but totals are easier with signs. Add two columns to the right of the table, and Excel fills them down for you:
Net (income positive, spending negative):
=IF([@Type]="income", [@Amount], -[@Amount])Month (so you can group without fiddling with date settings):
=TEXT([@Date], "yyyy-mm")Step 4: Build a spending summary with a pivot table
- Click inside the table and choose Insert → PivotTable, then OK.
- Drag Category to Rows.
- Drag Month to Columns.
- Drag Amount to Values. It should say “Sum of Amount”.
- Drag Type to Filters and set it to
expense.
That’s your spending by category, one column per month, with totals on the right. Sort the grand total column largest to smallest and your biggest categories rise to the top.
A few variations worth a minute:
- Top merchants: swap Category for Merchant in Rows. It’s a quick way to spot subscriptions and the coffee shop you visit more than you thought.
- Monthly cash flow: clear the Type filter, put Month in Rows, and use Sum of Net in Values. Each row is what you kept that month.
- A chart: with the pivot selected, Insert → Recommended Charts gives you a stacked column of spending by month.
A note on split transactions
A split shows up as one row, with the full amount and the first category in Category. The Splits column lists every part. If you split often, a pivot on Category will credit the whole amount to the first category, so check the Splits column for your biggest transactions before you trust the per-category totals.
Step 5: Compare plan with actual
The budget file has one row per budget item per month, with what you planned. Open it the same way. The money columns keep their $ signs, so add a column that turns Planned into a number:
=VALUE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE([@Planned], "$", ""), ",", ""))Now you can put planned and spent side by side. In a new sheet, list your categories in column A and months across row 1, and use SUMIFS against both tables. For a category in A2 and a month in B1:
=SUMIFS(Tx[Amount], Tx[Category], $A2, Tx[Month], B$1, Tx[Type], "expense")Excel’s limit is a little over a million rows per sheet, so even a decade of transactions fits comfortably.
Keep a copy either way
A CSV opens in any spreadsheet and will still open in twenty years. Even if you’re happy with EveryDollar, exporting once a year is a cheap backup of something you can’t recreate.
If you’re exporting because you’re thinking of leaving, the same files import straight into CalmDollar with a built-in EveryDollar preset, and the migration guide walks through it. You get the reports from Step 4 without building them, and the budget your household shares stays zero-based. But the spreadsheet is a perfectly good place for your history to live too. The point is that it’s in your hands.
