Help & support

1. Install Monatsklar from the Microsoft Store and start it. There is no sign-in.
2. Your budget book is ready: a current account, cash and 15 categories are set up. It is stored in Documents\Monatsklar\Haushaltsbuch.mkb.
3. In Accounts & categories, enter the opening balance of your current account – the balance before your first entry in Monatsklar.
4. Add your first transaction with Ctrl+N or load a bank statement CSV in Bank import.
5. Enter rent, subscriptions and salary once in Recurring, and set monthly limits in Budgets.

Pages in the left sidebar: Overview, Transactions, Budgets, Reports, Recurring, Savings goals, Accounts & categories, Bank import, Settings. The Overview shows your total balance, income, spending and what is left this month, plus budgets, recent entries and what is due in the next 30 days.

• New transaction: Ctrl+N or “New transaction”. Choose expense, income or transfer, then enter amount, date, account, payee, category and an optional note. Known payees are suggested along with their usual category.
• Save: Enter saves, Ctrl+Enter saves and opens the next entry, Esc closes.
• Transfer: money between your own accounts (e.g. current → savings). It is neither spending nor income. Deleting a transfer removes both sides.
• Split amount: one purchase, several categories? Add at least two parts that add up exactly to the total. After saving, the parts are separate entries.
• Search & filter: Ctrl+F jumps to search (payee, note, category or amount). Filter by account and page through months with Ctrl+← / Ctrl+→.
• Edit, duplicate, delete right on the entry. Export for Excel (CSV) is available here too.

Enter how much you want to spend per month for each expense category. Leave empty for no budget. Changes are saved instantly.

• The bar shows “… left” or “… over budget”.
• Suggest from average fills empty budgets with your rounded-up average of the last three months.
• With subcategories, a budget applies either to the parent including its children or separately to each child – not both.

• Choose a period: month, quarter, calendar year or last 12 months.
• Spending by category, 12-month trend, average monthly income and spending, savings rate, plus a month table.
• Export for Excel (CSV) saves the period’s entries.
• Save print report creates an HTML file. Open it in your browser to print or save as PDF. Transfers are excluded; refunds reduce their category.

In Recurring you create standing items: name, amount, account, category, interval (weekly, monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, yearly), next date and an optional end date.

• Due items are booked automatically when the app starts – including days when it wasn’t running.
• At the top you see fixed monthly spending and income; yearly and quarterly amounts are converted.
• Untick “Active” to pause an item. Deleting removes only the standing item; existing entries stay.

Create a goal with a target amount and an optional deadline. Use Deposit and Withdraw to record what you put aside. Monatsklar shows progress and the monthly amount needed to reach the deadline.

Savings goals are a tracker: the amount is not taken from an account. If you actually move money to a savings account, record a transfer too.

• Accounts: current account, cash, savings or credit card, each with an opening balance (negative for overdraft or credit card). Accounts with entries can’t be deleted – archive them to keep the history.
• Categories: separate for spending and income, with a colour and one level of subcategories. Archived categories are no longer offered but keep their entries. Deleting one makes its entries “Uncategorized”.
• Import rules: “text contains … → category” (min. 3 characters), applied to payee and purpose. Rules are also created automatically when you categorise imported entries.

Monatsklar doesn’t need online banking access. You download a CSV file of your transactions from your bank’s online banking and import it.

1. Export a CSV from your bank

In your online banking (in the browser, not the phone app), open your account’s transaction list, choose the period and use the export or download function in CSV format. Names and menus differ between banks and change from time to time – if in doubt, search your bank’s help for “export transactions” or “CSV”.

Detection applies to specific export variants, not every product of a bank. For comdirect, historical column names are documented; not every encoding or variant is verified. Check the preview, dates, signs and currency before importing. One currency per book; no automatic conversion.

2. Import into Monatsklar

1. Open Bank import (Ctrl+8) and drag in the file or click “Choose file…”.
2. Monatsklar reports “Format detected” or asks you to map date and amount (and optionally payee and purpose).
3. If needed, use Advanced CSV mapping: delimiter, header row, decimal separator (comma/dot), separate debit/credit columns or a D/C indicator. Save profile remembers the mapping for next time.
4. Choose the target account under Into account.
5. Check the preview: entries already in your book are marked “already exists”; you can deselect rows or give them a category.
6. Click Import. Done.

When you categorise imported entries, Monatsklar remembers it for that payee and assigns the category automatically next time.

• Automatic: once a day at start, Monatsklar saves a backup in the Sicherungen folder next to your book – by default Documents\Monatsklar\Sicherungen. The last 14 automatic backups are kept.
• Manual: Settings → Data & backup → Save backup as…, e.g. to a USB stick. Manual backups are never deleted automatically.
• Restore: Settings → Restore… and choose a backup. Your current state is first saved to the backup folder automatically.
• Open backup folder shows the folder in Explorer.
• If the book can’t be opened (e.g. damaged or locked by a sync tool), Monatsklar offers “Try again” and “Restore latest backup”. The broken file is set aside, not deleted.

If your book is password protected, the automatic backups are encrypted too.

Settings → Password protection → Set password (at least 6 characters). The file is then encrypted with AES-256, and Monatsklar asks for the password at start. You can change or remove it in the same place.

Important: there is no recovery. If you forget the password, the data can’t be accessed – not even by us. Keep it somewhere safe, e.g. in a password manager.

• Change location… moves your budget book to another folder (with confirmation if password protected).
• Open another book… opens an existing .mkb file.
• Create new book… starts another, empty budget book.
• Shared household without the cloud: put the book in a folder you can both reach (network drive, NAS, USB stick) and open it on both PCs. Please don’t edit it on both at the same time.

You'll find all of these under Settings → Data & backup. That's also where you set language, theme (light/dark/like Windows) and currency – amounts are not converted when you change currency.