Backup programs

I have been using SEE Finance for keeping a record of my bank account transactions. I goofed up and deleted a lot of files, so we tried retrieving them with backup programs. We thought we could find a file from a previous date (e.g. August 2014) on Time Machine and bring up files from that date, but we found that the program had automatically updated the files to the latest ones. Is this the way the program is supposed to work?

No, Time Machine does not work that way. The version of the file you backed up on August 24th should not have been updated by a later backup. Are you sure you opened the backup from August 24th and not the last backup you made?