I too came to YNAB after MS Money went kerplunk (with a very sudden, loud thud) a couple years ago. I love YNAB, but am VERY interested in seeing some improvement in YNAB’s statement reconciliation process.

It was a cool time-saving feature of MS Money, but I don’t think it has to be as complicated as a reconciliation wizard (at least at first). It could be as simple as providing an option to _not_ mark downloaded transactions as Cleared. This would allow the user to manually Clear transactions from the monthly statement and use the existing Cleared Balance as the amount to reconcile to the statement.

MS Money transactions 4 had different statuses as I recall: (U)ncleared, (E)lectronic Cleared, (C)leared, (R)econciled.

Transactions were entered as (U)ncleared (similar to YNAB today). Electronically downloaded (e.g. OSX in YNAB) transactions were marked as E. At reconciliation time, the application presented every transaction that _wasn’t_ in a (R)econciled status and allowed you to (C)lear each one (changing U’s and E’s to C’s). It provided some helpful sorts of these transactions that match statement grouping (e.g. “Deposits by Date, Checks by Check Number, then Transactions by Date”) to ease this process further.

When/if the manually (C)leared transactions matched the ending statement amount, you hit finish or something like that and all those C’s now become R’s.

The nicety about this then is you can have a filter based on “show me only unreconciled transactions” in your account view (in addition to) a filter by month(s). Which would also be very great side-benefit/feature.

I’m c# myself and I don’t know AIR, but would consult or do whatever to see this make a future (soon) release. In the meantime, keep up the good work and congrats on all the recent publicity. It’s been well earned.

P.S. Another helpful feature in MS Money was the cash-flow graph (based on account balances and scheduled credits/debits and category budgeted items and/or spending trends from that account)… I found it helpful in visualizing future impact of decisions you make with purchases today… good especially for people that live on edge of overdraft. Of course it can work the other way too (help some people see future income and how you can pay back decisions today with income in the future). In the end it probably doesn’t align well with the YNAB philosophy, but just some more random thoughts from a prior MS Money user.

I had someone misunderstand YNAB’s “C” feature several months ago and now need to find their error(s) and get YNAB back in sync — nightmare! and wouldn’t be if there were checkpoints like Quicken gives.

Consider, in the past I would get a paper bank statement at the end of the month, go through my register checking off the transactions, do a little math and come up with a balanced register. It looks like nothing has changed with YNAB except for the math calculating. Please add a auto reconcile function.

I’ve got to throw this one back at you. Can you explain why you think it’s NOT important to reconcile statements every month?