What?! There’s a new version of YNAB coming? Yes. It’s YNAB 4, and it’s awesome. If you missed the announcement, you can catch it here. We talk about pricing, availability, etc.

The profit & loss statement is finally here. Accountants and other geeks unite!

I’m finding the Income v. Expense report particularly useful now that our business runs solely on YNAB.

As with the Net Worth report, you can filter to your heart’s content. With the Income v. Expense report, you can actually filter on categories and payees as well.

Income sources are broken down by payee, so you can distinguish between employer income of his/hers, or income from various freelance or contractor sources:

You’ll also notice the expand/collapse all buttons available on this report. I find it most useful to view everything collapsed and see how I’m doing at a higher level. However, if you need to drill down, the option’s there for you.

The Export option still works like a dream, exporting exactly what you see into a spreadsheet-compatible CSV file.  This type of export may prove very useful were you to need to hand some documentation for your accountant for tax preparation.

All things said, this report has been a long time coming, so we’re excited to get it in your hands as part of YNAB 4. You’re going to love it.

What?! There’s a new version of YNAB coming? Yes. It’s YNAB 4, and it’s awesome. If you missed the announcement, you can catch it here. We talk about pricing, availability, etc.

We’ve made some huge improvements to the Spending report in YNAB 4. For starters, you can now view your spending by Payees.  That right there is a cause for celebration.

However, we made a lot of great visual changes as well. For starters, with the same size app window between YNAB 4 and YNAB 3, look how much bigger our charts are:

YNAB 4

YNAB 3

Yeah, so that’s a lot nicer.

The view begins at the master category level, but you can drill down to the category level pie clicking on a pie segment.  You get a nice breadcrumb to find your way home:

All of the standard filters are still available for both reports (timeframe, categories, payees, and accounts).

And once again, the sidebar on the right provides some nice tabular/total data when needed. It also doubles as a legend:

You can also click on one of the legend items and see the transactions making up that amount.  I can agonize over Walmart spending with the click of a button!

If you want to do further number crunching, the Export option is extremely useful.

In YNAB 4, Spending by Category is dramatically improved, a Spending by Payee debuts. You’ll be enjoying it shortly!

What?! There’s a new version of YNAB coming? Yes. It’s YNAB 4, and it’s awesome. If you missed the announcement, you can catch it here. We talk about pricing, availability, etc.

YNAB 4 lets you view all of your accounts in one register:

When you’re in that view, you can see all schedule transactions from all accounts in one place. You’ll also notice that we drop the running balance column (if you have that turned on) and add an Account column:

Searching across All Accounts is obviously where this feature really shines.

Guided by the smart dropdown…how much does our sample budget show was spent in Groceries, at Walmart so far this year?

My search query would look like this:

Category: Food: Groceries, Payee: Walmart, After:01/01/12

The window area of the footer gives me my answer:

The All Accounts view will be handy when filing your taxes, or building a case against your teenage son’s desire to empty the food pantry.  We’re certain you’ll come up with other great use cases for it as well.

Oh, and when you File -> Export, you can elect to just export the current view of your register, so in my case because of my search, I’d get a nice CSV that looked like this:

Hand that to your accountant! They love spreadsheets and things like that.

That’s just one more thing that makes YNAB 4 our best YNAB ever.

What?! There’s a new version of YNAB coming? Yes. It’s YNAB 4, and it’s awesome. If you missed the announcement, you can catch it here. We talk about pricing, availability, etc.

This is, without a doubt, the single largest feature we’ve ever added to YNAB.  From the user perspective, it “just works”, but from the development side of things it was quite a beast!

Cloud Sync basically lets YNAB on your iPhone or Android talk with YNAB on your desktop at work, or laptop at home, or netbook on the road. We send tiny changes across the wire, minimizing your data usage, and decreasing the time required to sync.

It’s kind of like magic. At least it’s still appearing that way to me after several months of testing.

Having your budget always up to date has been a huge boon for me and my household. Now Julie can see exactly where we stand with the budget (for her, “budget” means Clothes and Groceries).  I can punch in a new transaction while I’m out and it will sync with every other device in a matter of seconds.

The sync actually happens so fast you don’t really notice it.

For our first iteration of Cloud Sync, we chose to use the almost-ubiquitous Dropbox service.  Their service is free for 2GB of storage, and if you’re just using it for YNAB, you won’t need anywhere near that. Dropbox uses the same encryption your bank uses for sending things securely over the wire.

We may use other data storage services in the future, but honestly, we’re most intrigued with hosting the data ourselves, opening up possibilities I don’t yet want to delve into (a more seamless user experience is one obvious advantage, and not relying on a 3rd party is another, but there are more than that.) Taylor, YNAB’s lead developer, wrote a very thorough forum post re: the support for Google Drive, iCloud, SugarSync, YourFavoriteDataInTheCloudProvider, Local Networks, etc. I’d encourage you to check that out if you have questions about why we went with dropbox, or where the other services stand.

Um, set up is really easy. Once you’ve installed Dropbox, you’ll fire up YNAB 4 and go through a set up wizard, which is code for “click two buttons.”

We then make sure Dropbox is installed (on my machine, it is) and then present you with a final button to push:

Once that’s done…you’re done. You’ll be able to open your budget and it will be sitting in your computer’s Dropbox/YNAB folder.

You can then fire up a YNAB mobile app and walk through a lightning fast setup there.

Personal Experience

Just a few thoughts regarding my own personal experience as I’ve used the Cloud Sync functionality. It’s a game-changer. I regret underestimating the impact it would positively have on my budgeting workflow. (Just like I underestimated the impact having it on my phone would have on my finances overall.)

I know there are some of you that don’t want any financial data in the cloud, at all. That’s totally fine. Everyone has varying levels of comfort when it comes to technology and their data. You don’t have to use Cloud Sync. You can still sync locally on your wireless networks with your mobile app, and should be just fine.  You can even pick and choose which budgets are cloud synced, and which are not.

If you ever want to turn off Cloud Sync, you go to preferences, and click that big, sad, red button:

At any rate, enjoy Cloud Sync. Thanks for your patience as we worked tirelessly on this feature. It was a lot of work and will now be in your hands very shortly :)

Frequently Asked Questions Re: Cloud Sync

Will I have to use Cloud Sync?

Nope. It’s optional.

I’m already using dropbox to sync my YNAB 3 data, how is this any different?

1. It works seamlessly with the mobile apps.
2. You can have your YNAB file open on all devices simultaneously (no more worrying about conflicted copies in Dropbox).
3. It works without an internet connection. Meaning, if you’re offline, you can add/edit transactions to your heart’s content, and when do come back online, everything will “catch back up.”

YNAB 3 doesn’t allow multiple people to edit the same file at the same time. If you and your spouse open the same Dropbox file at the same time, and you both make edits, and both shut down YNAB, only one set of your changes will “win”. The others will be lost. Dropbox will tell you that the files are in conflict and you’ll have to choose to keep one file or the other. The same is true if you open the file at home, and then open it at work. Both computers are editing the file and might potentially be stomping on the changes the other computer has made.
In YNAB 4, multiple people can edit the file at the same time from multiple desktops and mobile devices, and the changes, as you make them, show up immediately on the other device. No more wondering, “Did I leave YNAB open at work/home?” No more hoping that your spouse isn’t currently working in the file. It’s been re-architected from the ground up to support sharing like this.

Will I have to purchase a new mobile app that works with Cloud Sync?

Nope. The mobile apps will be free updates (they’ve received a few other niceties beyond just Cloud Sync, but Cloud Sync is 90% of the changes you’ll see).  Our iPhone app still is waiting for Apple’s review, even though we submitted it now about a week ago. We’re hoping they’ll give us the thumbs up by Tuesday. (We’ve asked for an expedited review twice, and have been denied twice.)  The Android app isn’t subject to review :)

Does the desktop app need to be running in order for my Phone to work?

Nope. The data sits in the cloud independent of any device. If you work with an Android and your spouse works with an iPhone, they’ll both stay in sync with each other in real time.

Will the data stored in the Cloud be encrypted?

As the data is sent back and forth from device to device, it will be encrypted using industry-standard SSL technology (same tech your bank uses for your online banking).  The data will not be stored encrypted.  You can read more about Dropbox security here.

What data is stored in my YNAB file?

Obviously, YNAB stores what you put in it, so if you type the location of the buried treasure in a memo or note field, that goes in there. However, we aren’t storing bank account numbers and the like without encryption. If you import from your bank, YNAB does need to remember some bank account info so it can remember which account you imported your bank file to, but when it does that, it encrypts the number before storing it. (For you knowledgeable types, it’s hashing it with a unique salt). It will obviously be a personal decision on whether or not to use the cloud. We just didn’t want you to get the impression that your YNAB data was a sea of bank account numbers.

Everyone has different comfort levels as it comes to data be stored in the cloud, which is why we’ve made it optional.

I don’t have Dropbox, so how do I do this?

We walk you through it in the software. It’s really easy.

I want to use [insert favorite cloud sync data service] because [insert reason].

First, the reasons we chose Dropbox:

• Lots of people already use it.
• Free (at least for the amount of data YNAB needs to store).
• Well-known.
• Secure
• Easy to work with as programmers from both the desktop and mobile side of things.
• Easy to work with for YNAB users.

You can still use your favorite cloud service if you want to simply have a shared folder for two different desktop machines. You’ll get everything we offer with Cloud Sync currently (conflict resolution, working on both machines simultaneously, etc.) except the phones need the API, so they’ll only work with Dropbox.

What?! There’s a new version of YNAB coming? Yes. It’s YNAB 4, and it’s awesome. If you missed the announcement, you can catch it here. We talk about pricing, availability, etc.

We’ve improved the Register in more ways than I’ve just mentioned here, but I wanted to go through some of the main changes.

We were able to give each individual transaction significant vertical breathing room, increasing the height of each transaction by 35% while only sacrificing the number of viewable transactions on the screen by 20%.  We don’t see the loss of those viewable transactions as a real loss at all. There’s very little use case for being able to see six more transactions in a list, but there’s a huge use case for increasing the legibility by upping the vertical spacing and the font size.

Header

Side-by-side comparison

So where did the other 15% of the vertical win come from?

• We removed the “Account Actions” button in YNAB 3 and made account manipulation (Name, On/Off Budget) only manageable from the sidebar on right-click. It’s not an oft-used feature and didn’t deserve the prominence it was getting.
• The account title is no longer top-left. The selection on the left in the sidebar does a good job of telling you where you “are” in the software.
• The transactions edit dropdown was moved to the top-left spot.
• The date filter was moved to be left of the search field.
• The column chooser was given its own spot as a column header.
• The Select All, Select None options were removed (the checkbox in the header has the same functionality, so those links were redundant).

Footer

We gave the footer a much more active role in YNAB 4, where you can now initiate the reconciliation process, or open the Schedule Transactions window.

The “window” in the footer is particularly useful. When one, or no transactions are selected, it gives you account information:

If you select a few transactions, it provides contextual information:

The Scheduled Transactions window can now be completely hidden from view with the click of a button:

Notice that the icon is “smart” and tells us how many scheduled transactions we have upcoming.

You can still resize the scheduled transactions window once it’s open to suit your needs.

Filtering/Searching

When searching, or using the date filter, we’ve made it very obvious when you’re searching, and when not:

In the screenshot above, we’re viewing transactions in our sample file from “This Month” only.

The search should be very familiar to you:

And the results:

Oh, and if you didn’t notice it from the screenshot above, we’ve made a much more obvious, nicer-looking Add New Transaction button.

Transactions

Transfers to credit cards are a bit easier to spot, with a special icon just for those dastardly little devils:

The cleared column has been moved to the far right, right next to the transaction amount. This closer proximity will help you reconcile faster.

And look, the flag colors are in the order of the rainbow:

Everything’s right in the world.

You’ll still be able to jet around the YNAB Register like always. You’ll just enjoy it a lot more with increased legibility, and a few new features that I still haven’t mentioned (like sending future-dated transactions right to the Scheduler with a click).  This is just part of YNAB 4, and we’re certain you’ll enjoy the changes.

What?! There’s a new version of YNAB coming? Yes. It’s YNAB 4, and it’s awesome. If you missed the announcement, you can catch it here. We talk about pricing, availability, etc.

You’re going to love the new reconciliation process in YNAB 4.  YNAB 3 had no “reconciled” state for a transaction. The onus was on you to somehow mark the transaction you had last reconciled to, and then work forward from there, and we made you do all the math.

Not anymore.

From any account, click the “Reconcile Account” button.

You’re then presented with a pretty familiar dialog (if you’ve reconciled with other software before):

Just drop in the date of your statement and what the balance is.

You’re now in “Reconciliation Mode.” The footer presents all of the numbers you need to make sense of the math we’re doing, the cleared ‘C’ button becomes a much bigger click-target, and we purposely exclude showing transactions that 1) have already been reconciled or 2) happened past the statement end date.

So you see something looking like this…

I work my way down the bank statement, clearing transactions as they appear on the bank statement, until you can see that I have a difference of $5.29.

I mark that final transaction as cleared and voila:

I get a pleasant green button telling me that all is well.

After finishing the reconciliation, you can see my reconciled transactions are now locked. You can still edit memos/categories, but YNAB will get on your case if you try and change the date or amount.

I’ve always made sure YNAB matches my bank balance (and you should too). Using the reconciliation wizard has cut my reconciling time by about 80%. You’ll love using it with YNAB 4.

What?! There’s a new version of YNAB coming? Yes. It’s YNAB 4, and it’s awesome. If you missed the announcement, you can catch it here. We talk about pricing, availability, etc.

Perhaps the most oft-requested feature we’ve received is to have an autosave. The reasoning behind it: people aren’t used to having to save their files anymore (which is a great development). They were doing a lot of work and then losing it because we weren’t saving for them.

A small hitch: some people like to mess around with their budgets and don’t want to save the changes.

I believe we’ve nailed it with our implementation.

Autosave

We now save your budget for you, basically all the time. You should never get caught losing any work again.  It just happens. I can’t even show you a screenshot because there isn’t one to show. It just works. The app doesn’t slow down, show a progress bar, or anything else while saving. It. Just. Saves.

To give you an idea of how “secure” you should feel. If lightning strikes your computer, the most work you’ll lose is five seconds. We apologize for the loss ;)

Versioning

Let’s say you want to do some messing around with your budget, see what things will be like when you’re debt free and lovin’ life… and then you need to get back to reality, buckle down, and tackle the present. We’re there, autosaving everything…and taking snapshots of your budget in time:

You can see from the screenshot above that I have several versions to work with. Now, I hadn’t worked with my sample data file since May 22nd, so you can see a gap there. However, if you’d been in your budget on a regular basis, you’d see a very nice spread of versions:

• Hourly versions for the past seven days.
• Daily versions for the past month.
• Two versions per month in perpetuity.

The versions compress down so small, we’re not worried about hogging hard drive space at all.

So you guys are happy that we’re providing a much-requested feature, and we’re happy to no longer be the bearer of bad news when someone loses their work. We’re excited to have Autosave and Versioning in your hands in short order.

What?! There’s a new version of YNAB coming? Yes. It’s YNAB 4, and it’s awesome. If you missed the announcement, you can catch it here. We talk about pricing, availability, etc.

YNAB got a makeover, and the Budget has turned out really, really nice. I’ll probably overlook some changes we made, but hope to highlight the great improvements in this post.  Bear in mind that I used the exact same width and height of the app window when comparing YNAB 3 to YNAB 4. I’ll work from top to bottom.

Timeline

• The timeline now stretches only over the months of the budget, instead of the entire budget screen.
• Instead of showing as many years as possible, we just show one year (the need for multiple years is extremely small).

• We’re using the little yellow corner marker to indicate the current month, and using the small pointer underneath May to show what month is our left-most month in view.
• The design makes it clear that the months are meant to be clicked on, instead of dragged.
• If you’re using a very wide monitor (or unbelievably narrow), the timeline handles it gracefully. Why you would use such a narrow window, I do not know:

• Months where no data exists, are grayed out:

• We removed the overly large “Add Category” button in favor of the much smaller “+” button.
• We stripped out the chrome for the Categories header, which gave us some vertical space.
• We added a collapse/expand all feature:

• We removed the footer completely from YNAB 4. We saw that three of the four numbers were redundant and could be handled differently. That move won us back 70 pixels of vertical space and made for a less-intimidating screen for newbies.
• We now allow you to make notes on a per-month basis:

• We retained the ability to turn Rule Three on and off on a per-month, per-category basis. We simply gained back some gutter space on the right of each number by only providing the gutter if there was overspending and Rule Three had been turned off:

• Because we were able to combine the header and footer into the header, we gained significant vertical space. This allowed us to increase the breathing room of each row vertically by about 25%.
• The increased vertical space allowed us to increase the font size of the rows, while only losing 1/2 of a row in total vertical row count.

The Budget is our bread and butter with YNAB. These changes have made the interface less intimidating, and easier to work with. We’re excited to get it into your hands shortly.

What?! There’s a new version of YNAB coming? Yes. It’s YNAB 4, and it’s awesome. If you missed the announcement, you can catch it here. We talk about pricing, availability, etc.

No stone’s been left unturned with YNAB 4, and the sidebar was no different.  I lost count of how many iterations we went through on the sidebar. We’d actually coded it one way and had all been using it in Alpha testing and then abruptly altered course and came up with something absolutely brilliant. :)

The old:

The new:

First, the fact that it sits on top of that gorgeous blue thatch just makes me happy inside.

We went with some very strong contrast that worked really, really well.  We toned back the red negative numbers so they wouldn’t clash with the blue.  We brought in some nice, simple icons that scale well at the small size, but are vibrant.

We gained significant vertical space by dropping the Total Assets/Total Debts equation we had at the bottom of the YNAB 3 sidebar (not seen in the screenshot above).  We also killed the help box at the bottom left that you probably never used.  The reason we felt fine removing the net worth equation was because of the much-improved Net Worth report that is now available in YNAB 4.  We also knew that the Help in the sidebar was only useful at the very beginning of a user’s experience with YNAB, and after that it was just taking up space. Help is obviously still available in the file menu at the top!

More vertical space was gained by making the main navigation points (Budget and Reports) smaller. This allowed us to fit in a third, new navigation point: All Accounts (more on that in another post).

We neatly boxed off the various types of accounts, and renamed the hidden account feature to say “Closed Accounts.” You can still use this feature however you wish, but we are happy that the term Closed Accounts won’t be seen as ambiguous by newbies, where Hidden Accounts could mean pretty much anything.

To gain more vertical space, you’ll notice that you can collapse the types of accounts. For instance, I’ll grab the savings account and drag it into the Off Budget area (it appears once I start dragging if there isn’t already an Off Budget account):

Because of the change I made, I’m actually getting a notification that a transaction needs a budget category. Doesn’t that notification look nice? Also, notice how I have only the Budget Accounts view expanded. Focus. Focus. Focus!

The sidebar can be shrunken to only show account names instead of names and balances. You just click the little  button and you’ll be set.

For some final design touches, we made the Add Account button, which is important at the beginning, and then far less important as you move things along, a bit less intrusive but still obvious to the new user. We were able to completely rid ourselves of the View Hidden button from YNAB 3. Something that made me very happy.

Oh, I almost forgot. You can now add notes to accounts. Just right-click on an account in the sidebar and you’ll be off to the races:

Are sidebars boring? Yeah, kind of. But I just wanted to highlight some of the work we did behind the scenes to make YNAB 4 the best YNAB we’ve ever done.

YNAB 4 will be here in five days (Tuesday). It’s our best YNAB yet. You will love it.

YNAB 4 Sneak Peak

For a peek behind the scenes, and a first glimpse at the all new look, check out The Making of YNAB 4:

New Features in YNAB 4

Cloud Sync

Automatically sync all of your devices in real time. All you need is a free Dropbox account. It’s easier than ever to keep your budget up to date.

Improved Look/Workflow

Work with a fresh new interface that benefits from hundreds of design touches that create a more consistent, readable, intuitive and efficient experience.

Autosave

You’ll never lose your work. YNAB 4 saves your progress constantly.

Version History

Wish you could go back in time to undo a mistake? YNAB 4 lets you easily restore your budget to a prior state.

Collapsible Account Groups in the Sidebar

Have a lot of accounts? You can collapse your account groups to stay focused and distraction-free.

All Accounts View

View, find, and filter all of your transactions across all accounts with YNAB 4′s ‘All Accounts’ view.

Account Reconciliation

Use the new reconciliation wizard to reconcile all of your accounts with ease. It ensures that YNAB and your bank balances match.

Improved Importing

QIF users, this one’s for you. YNAB 4 won’t import duplicate transactions from QIF files, saving you potentially hours of time in account cleanup.

Bigger Text

Across the board, YNAB now uses larger text for better legibility. As I get older, the text will likely get larger :)

Better Spending Reports

View (agonize over?) your spending by category or payee. See just the information you want by easily filtering on accounts, categories, or payees.

Income v. Expense Report

Now you can see your net income to make sure you’re taking in more than you’re spending. See averages and totals of your spending over time. If you run your business books with YNAB, you’ll especially love this. It’s your Profit & Loss report!

Net Worth Report

A newly designed report with the ability to filter by date and include/exclude accounts gives you total control over the information displayed.

Better Exporting

Exporting to QIF or CSV is now incredibly flexible. YNAB will export only the transactions contained in your current filter or search (even across all accounts!).

And So Much More…

This list is not even close to exhaustive. There are hundreds (thousands?) of tiny improvements throughout the software.

Pricing

Seasoned budgeters like yourselves are excited about the awesome things I listed above, and then you remembered your budget: Wait a minute Jesse! What’s this going to cost?!

If you purchased on or after December 27, 2011, you’re covered under our “My timing couldn’t have been worse, I just purchased this yesterday” guarantee; this upgrade will be free for you. Please do us a favor and tell a friend about YNAB :)

For those of you that purchased on or before December 26, 2011, this upgrade will be available for $40. Don’t worry, this discounted price is good for a long, long time. (Budget to your “YNAB 4 Upgrade” category each month for as many months as it takes OR, just stick it in the all-powerful “Miscellaneous” category ;)

We are dying to have our hard work validated by having you vote with your hard-earned, budgeted money, but we will not force you to upgrade. Use YNAB 3 as long as you like. It’s yours. (As we did with prior versions, formal support for YNAB 3 will end one year from the launch of YNAB 4, on June 26th, 2013.)

What Happens Next

Over the next few days I will be writing in-depth blog posts about many of the features listed above. I’ll give more launch details as we draw closer!

You are going to love YNAB 4!

Updates on the Launch

June 22 – If you haven’t yet caught the in-depth blog posts that were posted today, you can find them here:

• Sidebar Improvements
• Budget Improvements
• Register Improvements
• Reconciliation
• Autosave & Versioning