YNAB You Need A Budget

[cspeter8]

I know this has been kicked around before, at least with ynab2.

I want a cleared balance column in ynab3. The intent is to allow me to reconcile to the bank records chronologically, when sorted by post date. Post date is the date that appears in the bank transaction history, which also appears chronologically.

I know I am not the only customer that wastes too many hours trying to find the source of mismatches, and/or trying to figure out why the ynab balance on a particular row does not show proper arithmetic. It appears that when I click on the cleared column to sort uncleared transactions to the end, the internal balance calculations are corrupted?

ynab 3 seems to lack much of the sorting and filtering capability of ynab 2. The balance calculation value in each row of the register seems to be alot more buggy in ynab3 as well. Maybe I would not need a columns for cleared balance and post date if I could filter out uncleared transactions, and still get a reliable balance amounts. I suppose this is both a feature request and a bug report.

Is it just me, or do other folks see flakey stuff with the balance column?

[Patzer]

I know this has been kicked around before, at least with ynab2.

I want a cleared balance column in ynab3. The intent is to allow me to reconcile to the bank records chronologically, when sorted by post date. Post date is the date that appears in the bank transaction history, which also appears chronologically.

I know I am not the only customer that wastes too many hours trying to find the source of mismatches, and/or trying to figure out why the ynab balance on a particular row does not show proper arithmetic. It appears that when I click on the cleared column to sort uncleared transactions to the end, the internal balance calculations are corrupted?

ynab 3 seems to lack much of the sorting and filtering capability of ynab 2. The balance calculation value in each row of the register seems to be alot more buggy in ynab3 as well. Maybe I would not need a columns for cleared balance and post date if I could filter out uncleared transactions, and still get a reliable balance amounts. I suppose this is both a feature request and a bug report.

Is it just me, or do other folks see flakey stuff with the balance column?

Nothing is corrupted, but it is working differently than you expect.

In Quicken, the balance column reflects a running balance as of the sort order. If you change the sort order from date to amount, you'll see dramatic move of increasing balances until you get to the end of the outflows with a big whopper balance, then decreasing till you get to the end of the list and see the true working balance on the last transaction. If you sort by cleared status, you'll see garbage balances until the last cleared item, which will show true cleared balance, then garbage balances till the last row, which will show a true working balance.

YNAB, in contrast, keeps the running balance sorted by date regardless of how you sort the transactions in the register. Other people have posted wanting it to work like Quicken does; there are arguments for and against doing this. My personal opinion is that if this is done, it should be a separate "balance by sort order" column, perhaps with the working balance title expanded to "working balance by date."

To get a cleared balance by post date column, you would need to have post date in the YNAB register records. This means you would need to either download all transactions as your primary source of data acquisition (a Very Bad Idea for numerous reason omitted for brevity), change your entry date to the bank's post date when you learn it (an administrative PITA, with the chance of moving some transactions into the wrong budget month), or create another field for post date (and download to get post date or live with the administrative PITA of entering post date.)

The poor man's substitute for a true working balance by post date column would be to simply add a cleared balance column by date conceptually like the working balance column, but using existing YNAB register dates. That will work fine as long as all your transactions clear in the order you entered them, possibly with some flip-flops for intra-day sort order. It's also the same thing you have now by hovering over the date in the register, only you could show the column to see all of them at once.

I don't think a cleared balance that does what you and others want it to do is a simple thing. The poor man's substitute might work for many people; but then you run into a late-clearing check, and debit or credit charges that clear slowly because of the system some odd merchant uses, and you still have to do the work of running down the mistakes the hard way.

Patzer

[cspeter8]

I totally forgot about that feature where the cleared and uncleared balances both appear when hovering over the date. For some reason I just assumed that it was not carried forward to ynab 3 (I finally switched over to ynab 3 fairly recently).

Also, Taylor replied back via email with this explanation that I found illuminating: ' Basically every transaction remembers its affect on the balance of the account, regardless of how you sort the register. So, that column is not recalculated when you sort'. (emphasis mine). This makes the 'hover over the date' feature totally invaluable, for me anyway.

I think if the matching logic between user-entered transactions and imported transactions could be enhanced a bit, with a settable option to go with the bank posting date rather than the date the user entered for the transaction, short of moving the transaction to a different month so as to not introduce changes to any monthly budget figures, that would be helpful. It would remove much of the 'pita' administrative work, in Patzer's words, that I end up doing. The ultimate would be to have a post-date column that would not flow to the budget. This would be populated totally by imported transactions. Whether the balance column would go by this postdate column, or not would not matter much to me, because the 'hover over the date' feature would do everything I need.

By the way, in relation to the aforementioned pita admin work, I find updating the date in a transaction more clumsy in ynab3 than in ynab 2. Are there some tricks to doing a register transaciton date update I do not know about that makes it easier?

Thanks

[Patzer]

I find updating the date in a transaction more clumsy in ynab3 than in ynab 2. Are there some tricks to doing a register transaciton date update I do not know about that makes it easier?

Without going to check, I think you're correct. Editing existing transactions in YNAB 3 is, in general, a bit more clumsy than in YNAB 2. That doesn't bother me a lot because I don't do a lot of editing. In particular, it's very rare for me to change a date on a transaction. This will happen only if I make a data entry error, because I don't care if the bank clears the transaction on a different date than I enter it. The date I commit to having the money leave my budget is the relevant transaction date for me.

Sorry I can't be helpful on edit tricks for date changes; I just haven't needed them.

Patzer