YNAB Criticism (2016)

16 thoughts
last posted Sept. 26, 2016, 4:49 p.m.

6 earlier thoughts

0

Third annoyance: No search or reporting.

I almost never look at historical reports of my finances, other than reviewing last month's spending. I don't care how my net worth has changed over time, as long as I'm budgeting so that it will go up and not down.

That said, I frequently would like to find all transactions of some specific amount. Somewhat less frequently, I'd like to know how much I spent in a given category over the past year, or I've wanted to see all the transactions with a certain vendor. YNAB doesn't really have affordances for this sort of thing. Not only are there zero (0) reports, period, there is not even a search box.

I can live without reports, but lack of basic search is a pretty big regression from YNAB 4.

Workarounds: you can sort all transactions alphabetically by payee, or in order of amount, and scroll around till you find what you want. But this doesn't give you any totals, and it isn't going to scale once I have more than 12 months of data in the new YNAB.

Budget categories do show you the average monthly budget/spend. It doesn't say over what time frame, bu the tooltip seems to indicate it's across all your transactions, ever. So if you wanted to know spending by category over the past 12 months, you could probably get a rough estimate by multiplying that average by 12...until you accumulate more than a couple of years' worth of data.

9 later thoughts