Import your data

Cova reads CSV and Excel exports from other trackers, banks and spreadsheets. You'll see exactly what it will save before anything is written — and you can undo the whole import afterwards.

What you need

A file with a header row. Only two things are required: a date column, and either an amount column or a debit/credit pair. Everything else — description, category, currency, wallet — is used if present and skipped if not.

Cova reads the header row and works out which column is which, including names like Transaction Date, Payee, Outflow and Money in. If it guesses wrong, every column is a dropdown you can correct.

Dates

Handled: 2026-07-18, 18/07/2026, 07/18/2026, 18 Jul 2026, Jul 18, 2026 and two-digit years.

Day/month vs month/day. Cova works this out from your file — a number above 12 can only be a day. If every date in the file is ambiguous (all days 12 or lower), it says so and lets you choose, rather than guessing. Check the sample rows before importing; getting this wrong reorders your history in a way that's easy to miss.

Amounts

Handled: 1,234.56, European 1.234,56, (45.00) for negatives, currency symbols, and CR/DR suffixes. Separate Debit and Credit columns work as an alternative to a single Amount column.

Direction comes from your Debit/Credit columns, or a Type column, or the sign of the amount. If every amount is positive and there's no Type column, direction is genuinely undecidable — Cova flags it and asks whether they're all income or all expenses.

Currency

A Currency column is read and the original amount kept alongside the converted one. Conversion uses today's exchange rate — historical rates aren't applied, so older foreign transactions are approximate. The preview tells you how many rows this affects.

Categories

Category names from your file are matched to your existing Cova categories, so Food lands in Food & Drink rather than creating a near-duplicate. The preview lists every category in the file next to a dropdown — map it, create it, or send it to Uncategorized.

Rows with no category are matched on the merchant name where possible (Fairprice → Daily necessities, Grab → Transport). Cova only ever uses categories you already have.

Preview, then undo

Nothing is saved until you press Import. The preview shows the column mapping, how many rows are ready, which wallets and categories will be created, the first ten rows as they'd appear, and every skipped row with the reason and the value that caused it.

After importing, an Undo last import button removes that batch cleanly. Re-importing the same file won't create duplicates.

If your file won't read

Use Download Cova template on the Import screen, paste your data into those columns, and import that. It's the same format Cova exports, so it always round-trips.