
Coming soon: Running Balance!
It’s one of our most requested features… and it’s coming to your budget soon!
Our development team has finished the highly requested Running Balance feature and it’s slowly being rolled out to YNABers everywhere.
Running Balance will be optional, and you can turn it on and off anytime! If you love a running balance, leave it on all the time—or invite it over only on Reconcile Tuesdays. It’s your budget!
If you don’t see it just yet, hold tight! Only a small number of users currently have the feature - this way our team can be certain there aren’t any show-stopping issues. We’re increasing that number as things go well, so everyone can expect to have access within the next few weeks.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask here or reach out to our support team if your questions are more personal than you’d like to share. If you already have access to this feature, feel free to leave your feedback below!
NOTE: To make sure the running balance displays in a sensical order, you'll want to sort by the Balance column. I previously included a screenshot sorted by date, which can result in the running balance totals out of order because of how we sort transactions that occur on a particular day. I'm including that here for reference, because it sparked quite a discussion. 😄
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Thanks for the feedback on the feature so far (really!). We’ve rolled it out to a very small subset of users, so that we can hear feedback just like this. YNABers who have the feature have been asked for feedback on a survey, and our product team has seen your comments here, but if you have more specifics to share, please fill out this same survey and let them know what’s working and what’s not. We take your comments seriously, and we’re looking forward to them!
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Can you remind me why it was excluded from the original nYNAB? I seem to remember an explanation about it not being necessary when you trust your category balances as YNAB instructs. Just out of curiosity, I'm just wondering if there was a change on that stance or if it just took 4 years to figure out how to code it.
Good news nonetheless! Thanks!
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I don't understand what I'm seeing in the screen shot. Starting Balance $500, ok, -$500 makes sense. Then $150, and then running balance becomes -$670, shouldn't it be $650? Then, $20, running balance -$520, shouldn't it be -$670? Then $12, -$682, now it's back on track. Apparently, there is a different order of operations going on here than the order they are displayed on the screen. Is that standard for a running balance?
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Matthew said:
I'm not a developer and I, too, used to wonder, "Why does it take so [expletive] long to ship something as simple as a running balance column?"One of the answers is: Designing, implementing, testing, and shipping features that really work takes an enormous amount of developer time and effort. A feature that would take a matter of days to implement in a slapdash manner might take fifty times as long to do properly—that is, to make sure it's designed in a way that solves the right problem, doesn't make the software overly complex, doesn't have negative interactions with other features, and so on.
Yeah, you're definitely not a developer if they fed you that load of garbage and you believe it.
cough Toolkit cough
ETA... although apparently from the screengrab, math is hard.
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Annieland said:
I don't get it. There's nothing in the search box. What is filtered??That's my bad. Faness was explaining that after sorting or filtering, that you needed to click on the running balance column to get a properly sorted running balance and then I looked at the screen shot and saw "Search Capital One CC" in the search box thinking Matthew had typed that in but now I understand that that's the default underlying text.
I've never found it necessary to select the toolkit Running Balance column to make sense of the numbers. This appears to work differently.
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adriana01 said:
if the Balance column only has correct info in a certain sort order, it should not be shown when the data is sorted differently.I agree 100%. Data that is incorrect should not be presented. If the sort order does not support all cells being correct in the running balance then I would at least grey out the running balance column to indicate it is currently inactive.
I would put a toggle button at the top (or highlight the Balance header when sort order is incorrect) to indicate that selecting it will resort and enable the balance column again. That would make it more intuitive.
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Matthew it sounds to me that tynab has "problems" with sort when entries fall on the same date. I would propose either that internal id being exposed fully or partially to correct date sorting. We should not have to sort by balance to see proper running balance. I see two "easy fixes":
-expose the internal id itself and use for multi entries on a single day to know sort order.
-expose a 0 based day_sort_index which calcs by entry_id-(min_id_val(entries_for_day)). So first entry is 0 then 1, etc. This would hide the internal id if that is of concern.
I am not sure what issues are not being discussed here but from outside this issue seems minimal to fix. Unless i am missing something, ynab has prob where entries are not taking into consideration of an additional field so it is not granular enough to reflect how running balance is calc.
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After reading through this mountain of comments, I realize I was right not to implement YNAB's running balance feature -- yet. I had planned to deactivate the Toolkit's RB, and add YNAB's. Yet, something along the lines of not fixing something that isn't broken made me hold off, and I'm glad I did.
Especially if, as has been implied, adding YNAB's version will break the Toolkit's. Has that been confirmed? That's alarming if it's true. I've said many times that without the Toolkit's features I wouldn't use nYNAB. I don't like thinking that YNAB would break the Toolkit. I am still using Y4 on Catalina as a double-check and for features that got inexplicably dumped in the new version
And if I'm correct (not being a programmer) that the code that the Toolkit uses is open source, meaning it's free for others to use, why on earth didn't YNAB use it? /r
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The thing I don’t get is that this doesn’t even make sense within YNAB’s own parameters. One of the questions new users encounter is that YNAB’s default largest to smallest sort order means transactions made on the same day sort differently than the order in which they were made. The fact that sorting by date causes the two dates to behave differently is also a bug...the larger (smaller outflow) transaction should be first on both dates.
Unless somehow there’s a ”time” attribute that has never before existed in the wonky screenshot, there’s more happening there than the register being sorted by date.
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In the version that I have..
If the transactions are sorted in the default order (date then amount) then the running balance is correct. There is is no question mark in a circle next to the BALANCE column.If the transactions not sorted in the default order then the running balance shown appears in correct. There is a question mark in a circle next to the BALANCE column. If I click on the question mark is brings up "Click the column header to return to the default balance sort order. Learn more"
See here for more details:
https://docs.youneedabudget.com/article/1601-running-balance
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It just arrived in my YNAB. Indeed, it automatically disables the toolkit - overrides it, basically. And I just clicked through a bunch of accounts turning it on, not touching ANYTHING as far as sorting, filtering, entering or adjusting a transaction, etc. And the running balance numbers do not follow. I can't even look at it, it makes me sick.
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Superbone said:
I don't think I should be expected to fill out a survey. Professional UI designers and programmers should do it right the first time. This is not too much to expect at this price point. It's frankly embarrassing.This!! I'm flabbergasted at the request to fill out surveys and forms for even the most obvious of features/bug fixes. It truly does seem like *the user base* has to do the thinking for the designers.....