Well, it’s finally here.

YNAB Pro is a stand-alone Windows application that will blow you away. It certainly has me. I’ve been using it successfully for the past three months and, while YNAB in Excel is still my baby, I’m — erm — never going back.

Back at the start of this year, I was contacted by Taylor Brown, who had a question regarding Excel’s capabilities handling a certain task. I wasn’t sure of the answer, but one thing led to another and we began discussing the possibility of YNAB being created as a stand-alone application. Taylor has extensive programming experience and a lot of enthusiasm for the principles that YNAB espouses. He was a perfect fit and we got cracking. Now, about ten months later, we have YNAB Pro.

If you’re already a YNAB user (and if you aren’t, why the heck not?!), you can “upgrade” to YNAB Pro. Just contact me and I’ll send you a special link that allows you to purchase YNAB Pro at 50% off.

(Basically, it’s as if you purchased Pro from the get-go, never working with the original YNAB system).

Oh, before I go off on what’s different, let me mention that I will continue to support, improve, and upgrade the spreadsheet version of YNAB. There are way too many people that really like using a spreadsheet-type approach for their finances. YNAB has become very popular, and I’d be a fool to let that go. Count on the same support you’ve received up until this point.

Just a few things worth mentioning:

• Of course Pro stays true to the Four Rules of Cash Flow.
• You can import your data from YNAB for Excel into YNAB Pro.
• Because Pro supports Master Categories, (Food: Groceries, Food: Restaurants), if you do import, you’ll need to assign your categories to Master categories.
• International currency and date formats are handled so well it gives me chills just thinking about it.
• Pro boasts gorgeous reporting that satisfies even the accountant in me.
• There is now built-in Receipt Splitting. Basically you select “Split” from the category dropdown and it takes it from there. The Splitter also has a built-in drop-down calculator for quickly calculating things like sales tax. (Well, the Splitter also can auto-distribute amongst categories, handling sales tax for you).
• The Budget looks beautiful. It’s organized by Master category, which are collapsible. My wife and I have loved this part of it, as it speeds up budgeting quite a bit.
• You can have as many categories as you like. Rename them, delete them, move them to other master categories, etc. The sky’s the limit.
• The date entry for transactions automatically sets at today’s date. There’s also a dropdown calendar that’s quite cool. Oh, and you can use the up/down arrow keys to move forward/backward through days as well.
• THERE’S A SCHEDULER. Honestly, I didn’t think the Scheduler would be so helpful, but it really is. I’m guilty of saying, “Oh gosh, how long does it take to enter Rent every month?” Well, man did I underestimate the time we were spending entering the same things every month. Heck, it serves as a bill-paying reminder to boot. The Scheduler now handles all of our automatic paycheck deductions, retirement contributions, rent payment, etc. It’s so easy to use, you’re grandma would feel comfortable in the driver’s seat.
• Helpful tooltips now make understanding come faster. By that I mean that when you hover over certain numbers in the budget, a nice tooltip will appear explaining why that number is what it is. It’s helped me a number of times understand what happened and why.
• Another extremely cool feature is Auto-Suggest Budgeting, which basically means you can right-click on a cell in the Budgeted column and see some common options to select and budget for that month: last month’s budgeted amount, last month’s spent amount, the average of the last three months, or what you have scheduled for the current month. It is handy. I’ll leave it at that.
• For the geeks I should mention that the data is stored in xml format, so you can have access to it in other ways quite easily.
• Familiar “Outlook” feel for navigation, along with keyboard shortcuts (again, for the geeks, myself included).

You may want to check out some screenshots of Pro as well.

Man am I excited to get this out there. It still has the Rules. It’s just built in such a way that the money management process has been significantly reduced. I honestly thought my wife and I had it down to about as fast as you can get it. We’ve shaved it in half. The redundant entries are now taken care of automatically, entries into the Register are faster due to the date entry improvement, and the right-click suggestive budgeting saves us even more time.

Your budgeting just got faster.