Ladies and Gentlemen, start your YNAB engine. When you do, you’ll be prompted to update.

And you should.

I’m just going to give you the highlight reel of what was months of work, and then another month of work by our superstar betatesters to find every little bug so we could squash them.

First, let’s start with the biggest feature yet: We’ve added commas to both the Budget and your Accounts’ register. That’s right, 1000.00 is now 1,000.00.

I jest! (Sort of — no commas for a year? *sigh* See, even I don’t get every feature I want right away.)

Numero Uno: Error Checking

Warnings, reminders, and errors, oh my!

Even you Top Gun Budgeters out there know that you occasionally have a mental slip. We’ll catch them now for you. Read about my discovery of a few errors in my own file back when I was running the alpha.

Turn on Error Checking in the File menu. Then turn it off again right there as well when you see all the errors :) Just kidding! Use this very thorough guide to error checking. When all of those errors are gone, warnings are erledigt and reminders are taken care of, you’ll feel awesome. The same way you feel after you’ve straightened all the pencils in your desk drawer (pointed north, perfectly parallel) and alphabetized your bookshelf.

This will keep your Budget balanced with your On Budget Accounts forever.

What? What did I just say? On Budget?

II: On/Off Budget Accounts

You can now designate whether an account is ON or OFF Budget. Checking? On. That Loan to your brother-in-law? Just let it go man, he’s not going to pay it back. Or you could make it Off Budget. Your Mortage? Off. Line of Credit that you tap into (you’re getting better and you soon won’t at all once you’ve become Habitually Aware)? On. Credit Cards? On. Car Loan? Off.

You’ll love how we separate the different types of accounts on the left-hand navigation. Budget tab is moved to the TOP to show that it’s the KING. On Budget accounts fall underneath it to show that they’re budgeted.

C: Fresh Start

For those of you that just turned Error Checking on and don’t want the warm fuzzies that come with taking care of all the errors, employ a Fresh Start (find that in the File menu). We’ll keep the categories and account balances, but lose the rest. Ahhhhh. Bliss. And with Error Checking on, you’ll be set for that not to happen again. And no, historical data isn’t nearly as important as you’ve been conditioned to think, *but* since we’re all filing taxes right now, do make sure you’ve saved your old file.

Other Awesome Things That Don’t Get Their Own Heading

This is for the newbies out there. Taylor built a newbie…handholding tutorial. Start a new budget and you’ll see it in action. It’ll help out the new YNABer a TON and we’re very excited to have it in there. No more questions on the forums about…anything really. :)

We’ve updated the help file a ton. I’ll bet you a sugar-free donut that your question is answered in there.

Adding subtransactions automatically sets your cursor in the category field. This streamlines split transaction entry a bit.

We’re more aware of plural(s) throughout the app.

Backups are no longer made when YNAB saves only because of a settings change.

When adding a transfer transaction from an On Budget to another On Budget account, the category field is skipped (it’s not needed — and that’s enforced with our error checking mode now as well, so don’t even think about it!)

We can now display notifications on startup.

Double-clicking on a bank statement file (OFX/QFX/QIF/CSV) no longer brings up the file-chooser.

And heckfire if we didn’t fix a typo in the Payee Settings dialog.

Enjoy the update. As always, updates are free, upgrades are not (though we always price to show our customer love). And, as is obvious from the past year, our free updates are big. Typos and all.