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Fixing currency symbols issues when opening Paidnice CSV exports in Excel

Denym avatar
Written by Denym
Updated over a week ago

When you export reports from Paidnice (for example Invoice exports or Contact exports) and open the CSV in Excel, you might see values like:

  • £47,859.88 instead of £47,859.88, or

  • Currency symbols missing completely.

If you upload the same file to Google Sheets, everything looks correct.

The export from Paidnice is fine – the issue is how Excel is opening the file.

What’s going wrong?

Paidnice exports CSV files in UTF-8 (a modern text encoding).

Excel on Windows often tries to read CSV files using an older encoding (like Windows-1252). When that happens, some characters break:

  • £ (pound) becomes £

  • Other special symbols can also look wrong or disappear

We just need to tell Excel: “This file is UTF-8” when importing it.

Fix for Windows: import the CSV with the correct encoding

You’ll do this inside Excel rather than double-clicking the CSV file.

  1. Open Excel

    • Start with a blank workbook.

  2. Use the “From Text/CSV” import option

    • Go to the Data tab (top menu).

    • Click Get Data → From File → From Text/CSV.

    • Choose your Paidnice export CSV (e.g. invoice_export_…csv).

    • Click Import.

  3. Set the correct file origin (encoding)
    After you click Import, a new dialog opens with a preview of the data.
    At the bottom you’ll see options like:

    • File origin

    • Delimiter

    • Data type detection

    Set:

    • File origin → 65001: Unicode (UTF-8)

    • Delimiter → Comma

  4. Load the data into Excel

    • Click Load.

    • Your totals/outstanding columns should now show £ correctly (e.g. £47,859.88).

Going forward, repeat these steps each time you open a Paidnice CSV in Excel. The file itself doesn’t need to change.

If you don’t see a “File origin” dropdown

On some setups, Excel skips the wizard. You can turn on the legacy import wizard which always shows the File origin option.

  1. In Excel, go to File → Options → Data.

  2. Under “Show legacy data import wizards”, tick From Text (Legacy) and click OK.

  3. Back on your worksheet, go to Data → Get Data → Legacy Wizards → From Text (Legacy).

  4. Pick your Paidnice CSV file.

  5. In Step 1 of the wizard:

    • Set File origin to UTF-8 (or 65001: Unicode (UTF-8)).

    • Choose Delimited, click Next, keep Comma selected, then Finish.

Optional: convert to numbers & format as currency

Sometimes Excel still treats the values as text. To make sure you can sum/filter them properly:

  1. Select the Total / Outstanding columns.

  2. Go to Data → Text to Columns → Delimited → Finish
    (no need to change delimiter; this just forces Excel to re-parse the values).

  3. With the column still selected, set the format:

    • Home → Number → Currency

    • Choose £ English (United Kingdom).

Now the values are real numbers with the correct GBP symbol.

Quick summary

  • Paidnice exports are already in GBP with the correct £ symbol.

  • Excel on Windows may open the CSV using the wrong encoding, showing £.

  • Import the file via Data → Get Data → From Text/CSV → File origin: UTF-8 to fix it.

  • Use Text to Columns + Currency format if you need them as proper numeric currency fields.

Still stuck?

If you’ve followed these steps and the currency still looks wrong:

  • Attach a screenshot of what you’re seeing in Excel

  • Attach the CSV you exported from Paidnice

Then message us via Intercom and we’ll walk through it with you.

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