We’re about to push out another free minor (that term is used loosely here) update to YNAB 4.  If you haven’t yet upgraded from YNAB 3, you can do that here at the usual discount.

At any rate, here’s what’s coming very soon (if it hasn’t already based on what I’m hearing from our developers!).

The Spending Trends Report is Back

Little did we know how much you guys liked the spending trends in YNAB 3.  They’re now back in YNAB 4, but much-improved.  We no longer have the issue of trend lines crossing all over each other, creating illegible masses of spaghetti.  We’ve gone with the stacked bar chart that makes things much clearer on an individual category basis, while also allowing you to see the overall trend.

You can drill into a category section, and drill even further to see the list of transactions that make up that segment.  That drilldown functionality is also available in the Spending by Category and Spending by Payee reports.

I made you guys a quick video to highlight the new addition to the Reports Family:

Report Settings are Now Saved Between Runs

You know how you have that one category that always need to exclude from your report? Or how you’re always wanting to see Last Month’s report, and keep having to change the date filter?  Now your report settings are saved from one start of YNAB to the next.  We thought you’d like that. (We’ve enjoyed the change internally as well).

Spitshine

We’ve also continued to polish and refine the app in ways you’d likely only notice if they weren’t right.  Ian (rodeoclown on the forums) sent me a list of 25 improvements, a few of which I’ve highlighted below (the rest can be found in this release’s notes when you install the update.

• Changed keyboard shortcuts to make more sense:  Ctrl/Cmd+R for reports. Ctrl/Cmd+T for All Accounts.
• Adding a new transaction to a register now scrolls to show the added transaction.
• You can now clear transactions by hitting ‘c’ while editing (but not when a text field has focus).
• Category names in QIF exports now match the QIF spec.
• Date filter settings are now per-report instead of being shared.

Ian also sent me a list of 36 fixes where one of the line items was “several other bug fixes”, so we’re at 36+ on the fix count.

The Quality Assurance Gauntlet

Why did this build take longer than most?  We now have Vesna, our resident QA expert that keeps us on our toes :) Thanks to Vesna for helping us squash a lot of bugs!

Granted, YNAB 4 has only been out five months, but this version, pushed live about 12 hours ago, definitely has more new features and improvements than any free update we’ve pushed out for it yet.  (All YNAB 4 updates will be free. Our next major version would be a paid upgrade. I reiterate this only to avoid eventual confusion with our update/upgrade policy.)

New Features

• In the Scheduler, there’s now an option to “skip this payment.”
• When importing transactions, you can now opt to exclude the memo field from importation. I personally lobbied hard for this one, because my bank puts a ton of very non-useful information in those memo fields.
• When viewing transaction lists (with the popover) in the Budget or Reports section, there is a “Show all transactions in the Register” button that will take you to the Register with the appropriate filters set. Very handy.
• Searching for multiple values of the same type now does an OR operation. So you could search for “Category: Christmas” or “Category: Gifts” to see all transactions in both of those categories. This works for payees, memos, flag colors, etc.
• From the All Accounts tab, you can now search for specific accounts.
• From the All Accounts tab, you can also now search for Open/Close/Budget/Off-Budget accounts.

Improvements

The Payee Settings dialog got a complete redesign. I jumped the gun and wrote about this new feature a while ago. You can read all about it here.

More improvements:

• The budget screen loads much, MUCH faster.
• Entering amounts in currencies using something other than “.” for the decimal separator now converts to the correct separator when the “.” key is pressed on the number pad.
• Clearing a large number of transactions is now much faster.
• Reconciling for the first time now runs much, MUCH faster.
• If you’re importing multiple accounts simultaneously, YNAB now jumps to the All Accounts view automatically on completion.
• Split transactions now show an amount remaining when the inflow/outflow is $0.
• Selecting another transaction while adding a new transaction now cancels the transaction entry.
• When matching imported transactions, the check # field is now ignored unless it contains an actual number.
• QIFs now export using DD/MM if the date format is DD/MM.
• The Closed Accounts sidebar group now has a subtotal displayed.
• YNAB now accepts QIF accounts of type “CC”.
• The Register now scrolls to the currently selected transaction when changing search criteria.
• YNAB no longer steals system focus once it has started.
• Reconciling transactions now automatically also “accepts” the transactions.

Bug Fixes

I count 59 distinct bug fixes, and many crash fixes.

Quality Assurance Pro is Now on Board!

Everyone say hi to Vesna, now our resident Quality Assurance pro! One of the reasons this build took a bit longer than we all thought was because Vesna likes to run a tight ship, so this build went through much more stringent testing than anything we’ve done in the past. I think we all agree that it’s our best build yet.

Unrelated: We’re Hiring

If you, or anyone you know, is an expert Ruby on Rails developer, we’d love to have them apply for a full-time position, working with a team that is distributed, friendly, and making a difference in people’s lives. Job details can be found here.

Back office discussions (over Skype, since almost all of us live in separate states, countries, or hemispheres) for YNAB 4 went something like this:

Team Member A: “Man, this is going to be great. I’m so glad we fixed ________.”

Team Member B: “What about payee settings? Are we going to overhaul that?”

Team Member A: “We need to…I don’t think we’ll have time.”

[Collective moans commence.]

I’m pleased to announce that, along with a ton of other fixes and improvements, we’ve completely overhauled the payee settings screen for our coming free update. It’s now much, much easier to use.

And I’ll bet 75% of you have no idea what I’m talking about. Well, you’re missing out on some serious time savings!

Our old payee screen looked like this:

The new screen looks like this:

You know that person that’s always willing to sing in front of people, but doesn’t sing nearly as well as they *think* they sing, so it ends up creating an awkward situation for everyone present?  That was how I felt about our old payee settings.  Awkward. A bit embarrassing.

You’re About to Become a YNAB Power User.

For those of you that have never seen the Payee Settings with the old version (again, no surprise if you haven’t used it–it was very confusing), you’re about to learn how to shave significant time off your YNAB workflow.  Some of you may even miss the time you had previously spent with your budget. It’s okay…but we all think you should find an additional hobby to fill the time.

Managing Duplicates

The easiest way to manage duplicate payees is through the Payee Settings.  For instance, our car and homeowner’s insurance goes through Bear River Mutual.  I scan through my list and notice I have a duplicate situation:

That just won’t do.

Excellent.

I know a bunch of you just breathed a big sigh of relief, knowing there’s no longer that duplicate payee sitting in my budget file.  Please ignore the Bear Paw one right above.  Come on, just ignore it. ;)

Managing Payee Import Rules

I have a combined payee now, and I notice that it has a bunch of “import rules” attached to it:

Payee Rules are handy little devils. And I think it’s important you know how to use them if you ever import your transaction files from your bank.

The gist of a payee rule, is that if a transaction is imported from your bank, and it fits one of the rules, then it will be automatically renamed to that payee.

For example:

If an imported payee contains “Bear River Mutua Ins.” anywhere in its imported payee, then it will be renamed to Bear River Mutual.

YNAB will automatically create rules when you rename an imported payee, which is why you see a lot of my “Is : Bear River Mutua Ins. Paymt 0812″.  At some point in the past, the transaction was imported with that as the payee, and I renamed the payee to Bear River Mutual, so the rule was automatically created.

Many banks and/or payees will dump a lot of junk in the payee field, like the transaction ID, or the date of the transactions, or the store number (Walmart #23 vs. Walmart #37…they’re all the same to me), and we OCD types certainly don’t like things junking our payee list, so the rules help.

Can you see from the above, that my rules with this payee are now redundant? If an imported payee contains “Bear River Mutua Ins.” then I don’t need a rule capturing the payee if it’s “Bear River Mutua Ins. Paymt 0812″ because my first rule already captures it.

So, with our fancy new payee settings area, I’ll consolidate my rules down to just one:

Now any transaction that contains “Bear River” will be automatically renamed to Bear River Mutual.  You know, since my homeowner’s and auto insurance (both through Bear River) are under my Bills : Fixed category, I could take this one step further and have the payee not only automatically renamed, but also automatically categorized, using the dropdown right above the rules section.

When creating a rule, just click the little ‘+’ button next to an existing rule and you can go to town. Your options are:

Removing a Payee from the List

The only way to genuinely remove a payee from your Payee Settings is to no longer use it in any transactions.

However, if you just want to clean up your dropdown of choices when entering a transaction (and you know you do…), that’s easy enough.

Select the payee you’re going to remove, and then un-check the box that says “List and autocomplete this payee.”  The payee will no longer show up in the dropdown, and if you’re typing the payee, it will not show up as an autocomplete option.

Once you’ve done that, in your list of payees, you’ll see an icon indicating it’s not being included:

You notice that Boden that’s bold?  Blockbuster Video (bless their hearts, we haven’t been there in years), is also bold. A bold payee means it has rules attached to it.

Comb through your payee list, combine duplicates, create renaming rules and auto-categorization so importing time is cut by two-thirds (I’m serious people! That’s totally doable!).  You’ll love it.

Payee Settings, the feature you never knew existed, now much improved in YNAB 4.

I wanted to show screenshots of the new Trends Report, but alas, it’s not *quite* ready for show and tell yet.  That will likely have to come in the free update after this one.

I don’t have a firm date on when our next update will go out, but it should be fairly soon, provided all still continues to go well in the betatesting arena.

P.S. This is totally off-topic, but for those of you that use Valve’s Steam for gaming.  YNAB is up for their Greenlight, where we would actually be available on the Steam platform for purchase.  We have to get votes though, so if you want to vote for us, you can do that here. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, that’s okay too!  (If we do end up selling on Steam, it won’t change anything at all for you guys, it will just be another channel in which we can market YNAB. Gamers need a budget.)