
"Your credit card payment was greater than what you had available in your budget."
I always use the mobile app to keep track of my purchases and, on the first of every month, I pay off my entire account budget. Today, it is telling me that I paid over $400 beyond what I budgeted for my credit card. I can't make sense of where the number came from or why it is there. Not sure how to troubleshoot this.
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Hi Purple Foal !
When your Credit Card Payment category is red, it means you made a payment for more than you had “Available” for it. Here's a video explaining the following reasons why this can happen:
- Overspending. If you had any credit card overspending in your budget (in the current or a previous month), the amount “Available” for your payment would be lower than the balance due. If you still paid the full amount, you’ll have spent more on your credit card payment than you had budgeted.
- Starting Balance. If you had an outstanding balance on a credit card when you set it up in YNAB, and you paid that in full but didn't budget for it in the Credit Card Payments category, it'll show your Credit Card Payment category as overspent. Budgeting for that balance in your Credit Card Payment category lets the budget know you plan to take some of the money you have and use it to pay off that existing balance. Here’s a video explaining how this works.
- Overpayment. If your payment created a positive balance on a card, the positive balance is treated like cash and is added to To be Budgeted. Budgeting those dollars directly to the Credit Card Payment category will bring it out of the red.
- Returns/Refunds. If you had any returns/refunds on this card, and you had already paid for those purchases, you might see that your payment category is short and goes red.
For all of the above scenarios, the solution at this point is to budget directly to the Credit Card Payment category until the Available number matches your next payment amount. If you don’t have any dollars To be Budgeted, you'll need to move money from other categories.
I'm going to go ahead and mark your question as answered, but feel free to tag me if you have any questions about this! :) -
Hi Janelle at YNAB !
I appreciate the reply -- I definitely had some returns this month -- but I'm still confused as I accounted for those returns in the app on my credit card. I've done what I always do with my credit card as I've used this app for the past several months and I've never encountered this.
So in the end, I don't know how it says I paid more than I budgeted when I tracked everything in the app and paid off my credit card like I always do. I also don't understand how budgeting extra money to my already paid off credit card somehow fixes the issue.
Is there any way to just zero it out and start fresh for the month? Or will it go away next month? I don't see the value in the warning.
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I've had the exact same issue; I only noticed it because there is a difference between imported transactions and manually added transactions. I imported some credit card refund transactions, categorised them back to their original category; they don't show up in the credit card payment category - working as expected. Then I manually added a credit card refund, categorised it back to the original category, but it insisted in classifying it as a credit card payment that I made and needed to budget for - when it wasn't! It's definitely a bug - it shouldn't behave that way.
It's not a payment I've got to budget for, its a refund that should just go back to the category.
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I am having the same problem as others here, where my Credit Card balance has gone into the red twice in the last 3 months (Feb $37 and Apr $416) with no explanation. It has never done this before and nothing has changed in the process for how the credit card is being used in YNAB.
The difference with the others in this thread is that I have had no refunds on the credit card.
Essentially every transaction has been allocated to a budgeted category, and the payment is an automated payment (by the bank) for the full balance of the statement.
Janelle said:
1 Overspending.Nothing is overspent since all transactions have been budgeted and categorised, and at the end of the month all categories are green
2. Starting Balance.
Starting balance is $0
3. Overpayment.
No overpayment, all payments are for the exact statement total amount paid on the day it is due.
4. Returns/Refunds.
None
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I agree with the initial posting. This question is not answered! I have run into the same problem more than once which has inevitably lead me to starting fresh. I always thought it was a problem with my budgeting but I noticed this time convincingly that the problem has a huge gap or bug. I entered items into the same account that was giving me a red margin and it happened again, totally a bug in the account. This credit card only has a starting balance and a paid balance which are of equal values but the budget says I owe some variable amount of $930.00. In fact I have restarted my budget 3 times over the past 2 years and this is probably the bug back to bother me.
YNAB, before you lose sight of the program and initial reasons you made this program, please mark this question as unanswered, stop the automatic importing, and fix this bug!
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I am also having this issue, probably because of returns, and it's beyond frustrating. If I charge $200 on clothing on my credit card and categorize it as clothing, then return $100 worth, I want to categorize the return as clothing so that my clothing budget is accurate. But then my credit card "budget" appears in the red. How on earth are you supposed to keep track of individual categories and be able to run reports if returns throw everything off? It makes zero sense to "cover" the made up blown budget with money from to be budgeted.
I'm on the verge of canceling YNAB over this issue.
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I had this issue and couldn't for the life of me figure out what was happening... but then I got it. In my specific case, I had credit overspending on a category that I had made transactions with two types of accounts (cash and credit card). The first few transactions were with two credit cards, the last one with cash. For some reason, YNAB assigned the debt of the last cash transaction as Credit Card Payment for one of the cards, which confused me a lot.
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In my case, it was that I'd categorized some transactions months/years back as "To be budgeted" instead of a proper budget category on a credit card that I've changed to barely using. Changing those transactions to use "Stuff I forgot to Budget For" in those historical transactions ended up solving this for me.
I think perhaps YNAB could help its customers avoid this mistake by not letting a transaction on a credit card account use "To be budgeted".
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I've got this issue.
To be clear. When we make a transaction on the credit card account YNAB transfers money from the relevant budgeted category to the credit card budget as money budgeted to pay for it.
If there have been 0 returns and the credit card account was started with 0 balance, there is no reason for a discrepancy to be there if someone pays off a credit card in full. When that is done, the credit card budgeted category should have anything remaining in it as budgeted that was a transaction made after the end of the credit card statement for that period which you paid off the statement in full.
It's as simple as that.
Anything else is a bug OR if you are so sure it is not a bug then someone needs to answer why this is happening clearly so we can adjust what we are doing wrong or else I fear I can no longer use YNAB as this is a major issue that leads me to overspend if I have already budgeted for the next month before I made the card payment in this month.
EDIT: to give more context. If you click on "View > Show Running Totals" from inside my credit card account, it shows the accurate negative balance in there (in my case -$108.93, which is the amount spent on the card since the last day of the statement period, i would expect to see this amount as budgeted in the budget credit card account). In my case an overspend of -$513.47 is shown in the budget credit card account category. If there were no returns or a balance when the credit card account was created, what's going on???
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Violet Boa said:
this is a major issue that leads me to overspend if I have already budgeted for the next month before I made the card payment in this month.This makes me think that your issue is actually Stealing From The Future. Search that on the forum.
Bottom line solution, don't budget towards next month. Keep your money on this month's budget page with an Income for Next Month category. Or (and) use the Toolkit that has a warning about overbudgeting in the future.
SFTF bit me 3 times before I figured it out. It's most certainly a bug. I don't know why it's been allowed to persist.
On another note, there's a list floating around the forum of things that can cause the CC payment category to disagree with the balance. You could search that, too.