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The PennyBolt file

Your entire financial life, in a single file you control.

Last updated: April 16, 2026

Your PennyBolt data lives in a single file — the .pb file you named when you first opened the app. Every account, transaction, payee rule, and category you’ve ever added is inside it. Nothing lives in a cloud. Nothing lives on our servers. The file is yours to copy, rename, back up, or carry on a thumb drive.

flowchart TD
  F[".pb file"] --> A[Accounts]
  F --> T[Transactions]
  F --> P[Payees and rules]
  F --> C[Categories]
  F --> R[Preferences]

Everything PennyBolt knows about your finances lives inside one .pb file.

What the file contains

The PennyBolt file holds five kinds of things:

  • Accounts. Each checking account, savings account, credit card, or other account you’ve added.
  • Transactions. Every imported or manually entered transaction, with its date, payee, category, and amount.
  • Payees and rules. The names PennyBolt uses for merchants, and the rules that apply categories automatically.
  • Categories. Your full category tree, including any you’ve renamed or created.
  • Preferences. Settings, report configurations, and reconciliation state.

When you make a backup, you get all of this in a single .pbbackup file. When you move to a new computer, you copy one file.

Where to keep it

Keep the file somewhere you already back up: your Documents folder, iCloud Drive, Dropbox, a folder on your home server. The file doesn’t need to be online; PennyBolt only needs a copy it can reach when you open it.

The exact path on each operating system is in Where your file lives .

The file is yours

PennyBolt uses an open, widely supported format on disk. If you ever need to read your data outside of PennyBolt — years from now, under any circumstances — you can. You will never be locked out of your own financial history.

See also