JoeDid the error here is in the requirements specification, explaining in English exactly how the new feature behaves. This should have been done before ANY code was even written, let alone tested or released. A requirement to display a question mark because the results are nonsense should be a huge clue there is a problem.

My point being their development process is sadly lacking.

C'mon YNAB. You must do better. If you continue such botched development, your competition WILL catch up to you.

dakinemaui You left out "Is there a professional User Experience designer on staff?"

nolesrule We've known the answer to that question for years, tho.

Hi dakinemaui  !

The answer to those three questions is 'yes'. The logic behind the running balance is that if the numbers recalculated regardless of order, it would be less helpful. 

When releasing new features, we release them internally and to our beta testers first. Then, to a very small percentage of active users. We ask users with the feature for feedback, to make sure it's being received as we had hoped, and then re-group based on that feedback. 

dakinemaui I didn't even look at the survey, other than to click the thumbs down when I got the little notification because I just *knew* in my gut there was gonna be trouble.  I don't get why such a "new feature" should need feedback.  You put it in and it works, or it doesn't.  This is a binary operation.  Surveys would be more helpful BEFORE new features are implemented to get an idea of what the user base feels would be most supportive of successful budgeting.  And then they decide, and implement it accurately after some beta and UE testing.

I just don't get this company.  They're either light years ahead, saving financial lives, and offering us tools that are probably still one-of-a-kind, or completely backwards and unintuitive and plain bizarre.  I could give examples but I don't want to get obnoxious on an empty stomach except for 2 cups of coffee.

briefcase ?????  We're trolls?  Who wrote this post? https://support.youneedabudget.com/t/x17hb2/ynab-you-just-dont-get-it

Annieland Hey, y'all wore off on me for one day.  Sh*t happens.

Yes, there is a group of people that prowl the YNAB forums, both this one and the old one, just waiting for YNAB to do something so they can criticize it.  They're trolls.  Once I realized that I had no desire to be like them, it made their advice and view point pretty much worthless.

briefcase I too once spent a lot of personal capital defending YNAB's bizarre choices against those who seemed not to get it. YNAB proved me wrong. And I hate being wrong. 

You strike me as the kind of person who probably also hates being wrong, so I'm just going to warn you that 4 years of experience tells me being a YNAB apologist is probably going to mean being wrong. But if you'd like to learn from experience, keep right on. They'll come through and make you feel foolish for defending them, eventually. 

The really stupid thing is I still prefer the web app to YNAB 4. I think they made some really smart decisions in this software and I think on the whole, it's better for the level of financial awareness (i.e. almost none) that most people actually have. But I also I think they made some phenomenally dumb decisions in implementation. And unfortunately, the company policy seems now to be to double down on the dumb decisions until they get publicly dragged. So...this is the public dragging because it has become the only way to get feedback acted upon. 

briefcase I feel like you were literally just asked to rejoin the dark side 😂

For what it's worth, I dont think liking a feature makes anyone an apologist. Does it work differently than expected? Maybe, but it still works and YNAB is telling you in detail how it functions.

Til Debt Do Us Part Maybe I shouldn’t speak for others, but I think the hurricane started because we saw an account register that did not behave as we expected.   And that goes beyond a mere feature addition which may or may not be welcome, but a core functionality. 
 

It’s kind of scary, but I can’t imagine functioning financially without YNAB at this point.  Not to be over dramatic, but it’s practically life or death.  Since starting YNAB my finances have changed SO many times, my family has expanded, priorities have continually shifted, and I anticipate much more of the same going forward.  If I didn’t have YNAB holding my hand along the way I’m not sure my lights would be on right now.  Assuming others share my experience, when we suddenly see our little numbers look all wonky, there is a somewhat visceral reaction, because basically, our life depends on it.

RIP_MSMoney This is actually unclear, because Matthew says he sorted by date and Faness says there is more than one sort happening in the wonky screenshot. If you sort by the running balance, it appears in order, but...if you sort any string of numbers by size, they subsequently  appear in order, so I'm not sure how that actually is solving anything/demonstrating that the feature works.  

WordTenor To me, the argument should be simply, "sorting by date should result in the SAME output as sorting by running balance. If it doesn't than the sort by date MUST be fixed" If we sort by any other column than indicate that running balance is NOT correct.

I would suspect that their impl will never match toolkit as they will do server side calc as opposed to client side in order to support multiple platforms. 

RIP_MSMoney Agreed. Does anybody really need the functionality that every sorting method affects each other? Is that really necessary? Was that even how it was designed or is it just emergent behavior?

Superbone To be fair, toolkit calculations also "gap" when dealing with cleared transactions. Wouldn't this be an example where it should indicate that "this is not accurate"? (maybe I am missing something). For instance:

RIP_MSMoney That's what I wanted to check, but couldn't. It never bothered me in that situation. It made sense.

Move Light Sound Life So I understand, is this the "missing aspect" that people are not liking? Like, I saw from the screenshot that the ordering seemed wrong. (-500->-670->-520) aka the -520 should have gone before -670 but to me, that is a sorting problem on their end. Is that the only issue or is there gapping as well? 

I am trying to understand precisely what is the issue people are seeing. Like, if the sorting worked when sorted by date, would that be a "working" system then?

RIP_MSMoney there is no obvious indication in the first screenshot shared that the sort order was not the calculation order. The presence of a question mark does not usually indicate "something is wrong here", it means "more info". Also, it's pretty small & doesn't grab attention when it appears or disappears.

So we have a set of transactions which appear to be sorted correctly (the v is on the Date column) but the Running balance is off on 9/22. 

If the sort order is so vital to their implementation of Running Balance, either that sort should be forced when running balance is on, or running balance should be hidden (with a notice to click to re-sort & show it) when the sort order is wrong.

I think something that works forward or reverse would be better, but if this is what they went with for the release, the above is what I would expect.

RIP_MSMoney I'm not sure what I'm looking at in your example. Those are uncleared transactions and the running balance seems to have no relationship to the transactions.

Superbone i guess thats my point. That is date sorted, and toolkit running balance

RIP_MSMoney Filtering by date does not guarantee transactions are in the default order, because transactions within a date can be sorted by other factors. For instance, the following is in the correct order by date sorted by Payee (alphabetically):

11/20/19 .    A .    Reimbursements .    -$17 

11/20/19 .   B .    Fun Money .    -$15

11/20/19 .   C .    Groceries .    -$20

Those same transactions would appear in this order if sorted by category within the given date:

11/20/19 .   B .    Fun Money .    -$15

11/20/19 .   C .    Groceries .    -$20

11/20/19 .    A .    Reimbursements .    -$17 

However, for the default sort order (largest inflow to largest outflow), they would appear as follows in the register:

11/20/19 .   C .    Groceries .    -$20

11/20/19 .    A .    Reimbursements .    -$17 

11/20/19 .   B .    Fun Money .    -$15

They're still by date, but the sorting factor within each date can change the transaction order. Clicking on the Balance column ensures the default transaction order is in place so that the running balance appears in order.

We truly appreciate the discussion being had in this thread, I just wanted to give an example to make sure your initial question was addressed.

Faness The concept of a running balance within a given day is a bit arbitrary. I think it's fine to recompute the RB to align with the secondary sort key. Presumably the user sorted that way for a reason, so why not respect that order with the RB?

dakinemaui Exactly. I understand why YNAB's default sorts intraday transactions the way it does -- it's a worst case scenario -- but was always been kind of annoying that it couldn't be changed. To make it so that running balance only looks like it makes sense if you sort intraday the way YNAB wants you to, not the way you want to, is  poor coding and poor UI.

dakinemaui The idea was that if the running balance recalculated with every sort, it would be less helpful. My example sorts different factors by date, but if sorted by a factor other than date and the running balance recalculated, there wouldn't be a chronological order to things. 

Faness thank you for confirming. that is my point though! Correct the ynab date sort to match that of balance. Running balance should be a date sort as it shows the "running balance". You are missing a field in your sort algo for date sort. Change it to filter by date and for those transactions that land on the same day, change to match that of your internal db where u applied the running balance field to the record.

Faness so to be clear I am suggesting that date sort should intrinsicly enable outflow sort internally. Or rather, date sort should internally take into considering outflow with its "collision" of same date transactions. Just amend the less than operator lol.

But i would argue that an sort index field would be better. All trans have 0 (first item) and for multi trans on a day ynab would index as necessary (0-n) and use that with your date sort.

RIP_MSMoney You mean, disable the secondary sort for the date sort, so that sorting by date only allows one order of the transactions, correct? That way sorting by date automatically sorts to the default?

Faness I'm curious what the use case is for a secondary sort in the first place? I keep trying to think of one, and can't come up with anything. I guess Maybe a payee (1) Amount (2) to help with scalability in finding specific transactions when looking across a large range of transactions. But I can't imagine there would be enough transactions on any one date where an explicit secondary sort would be necessary.

Faness no. Don't disable anything. Keep the secondary sort as that is a nice feature. I am saying that when sorting by date the logic should be:

struct date_sort
{
    inline bool operator< (const Record& struct1, const Record& struct2)
    {
        if (struct1.date != struct2.date) return struct1.date < struct2.date;
        // You need to consider whatever running balance is using
        return struct1.outflow < struct2.outflow;
    }
};

This change STILL honors the date sort but modifies ordering slightly to align itself with running balance. This change should also still work with secondary sort as well. 

nolesrule The secondary sort works on any combination of sorting factors. You can sort by category and payee to see which store you purchase the most groceries in, or sort by amount and payee to see where you spend the most money, etc. 

As far as sorting by different factors within a date, the All Accounts section may have quite a few more transactions than one account in particular. Direct import also comes to mind - for those who don't use manual entry and have banks that only clear transactions on weekdays, all weekend transactions clear on Monday (so up to 3 days worth of transactions in a single day). 

Faness You're overlooking where I said date is the *primary* sort key. 

I agree that when sorting first by category that it doesn't make sense to recompute -- though it probably doesn't make sense to display the RB at all in such a configuration.

nolesrule I don't see the secondary sort either. In your hypothesized use case, I would simply search for that payee then primary search by date (or maybe amount).

In other words, it was easy to achieve a targeted two-key sort when desired. Having a persistent two-key sort that is very non-obvious when it's in effect leads to confusion and wasn't needed.

The fact most people don't know about the feature (Fanness's statement) suggests it was NOT user driven. That leaves "gold plating" by a developer that didn't know how to effectively search.

dakinemaui Just to make sure I'm understanding correctly, you're advocating for the running balance to always recalculate if the date is the primary sorting factor, and either be greyed out or disappear when another sorting option is selected?

Faness yes

 dakinemaui Faness I would not like it to disappear if sorted by date and then cleared status. I perpetually keep uncleared transactions at the top of my register and would like to use the vast majority of the running balance, which would be correct. 

Move Light Sound Life Right, if date is primary, it should be visible. And make sense.

dakinemaui And I also want to see the running balance if sorting by cleared status is primary, date secondary. I just want to be clear about that, just in case anyone with decision-making power was going to decide otherwise.

Move Light Sound Life Thank you for taking the time to clarify! The secondary sort has made this feature trickier than I had expected and I appreciate you letting us know you don't want to see it removed. 

Move Light Sound Life Would filtering for uncleared transactions (hiding reconciled) then sorting primary by date work for you? That would allow the RB to be displayed when date is primary sort key only. 

dakinemaui I suppose that would be an extra process I would have to remember to do. Right now, I like leaving the reconciled greyed out below, having active transactions that get cleared quickly above that, having uncleared transactions above that (checks or orders with longer shipping times can take a while, and sometimes I need to follow up, which necessitates remembering...), and scheduled transactions are greyed out above and easily collapsible. 

For me, everything is out of sight, out of mind. I'd rather keep my workflow (wouldn't everyone - how selfish) of keeping important things visible and not add a step, especially when it's the kind of step that is only required sometimes, but doing the step is what allows you to see whether or not you should have done the step.

The Toolkit running balance on the uncleared transactions being off never bothered me because I knew they were out of date order (I was never even looking at those). 

dakinemaui My reply is pending review. Testing to see if it's a word or just me posting too much (in frustration? Maybe I shouldn't have been so frank?) or something.

Seems not to be personal. That's good. Short answer: I like to keep things that I need to think about (longer-term uncleared) visible, and I really don't like hiding reconciled transactions, as it makes me think I've forgotten something.  It seems silly to filter just to look at a single transaction without scrolling through a couple weeks of reconciled, date ordered transactions. Plus, I'd have to remember it's there in the first place to want to look at it.

Move Light Sound Life I agree if date is not primary, you should expect a RB to look a bit weird. However, I'm continually surprised at the lack of awareness of some users.

Maybe if date is not primary, the RB should be computed using the standard/bank order (largest inflow first), but displayed in gray to better highlight it's a "gray area". (instead of not being shown at all).

dakinemaui I can go for that. Greyed out would actually make my brain very happy because it would mirror what I'm thinking. How elegant. Now, we need someone to swoop in and put the idea in the developers' mind.

Matthew Faness ? Can you make sure the devs hear this feedback and what I suspect many of the critics would find useful?

dakinemaui I've also filled out the proper form. :)

dakinemaui We're sharing this information with the team, but to make sure nothing is missed—filling out the Running Balance survey is much appreciated!

Superbone And I might cut more slack if they were doing the education part well but screwing up the software...unfortunately both are lacking now. 

RIP_MSMoney // Superbone lobs tomato over barricade... 😋

Superbone // RIP_MSMoney reaches for the basil and starts boiling water...  :)

RIP_MSMoney Oh I think that was 100% on topic: Annieland must've been planning to do some serious YNABbing because she pulled out all the receipts.  😂

WordTenor bahaha that’s funny and I’m flattered :)  But seriously, I’m not like that at all. I’m a YNAB/excel nerd like everyone else. And I generally have a very positive outlook and I do prefer the current YNAB overall. I just think it’s a little “extra” to call a bunch of experienced and intelligent power users trolls for having a spirited exchange with tech support.  But it’s cool, I get it.  Definitely not looking for trouble here 😎.

RIP_MSMoney 

RIP_MSMoney said:
Just suggesting but it may benefit to direct efforts more towards how the situation can improve vs tearing into people...

 I love that more people seem to be taking this approach. I've only seen one or two negative comments with no helpful suggestions included. 

Move Light Sound Life I dont think you have an option to not upgrade. I believe the notification simply means, if you refresh now, you will get the update. I highly doubt it is an opt out but rather "i will refresh later"

RIP_MSMoney This is correct. I had no choice or warning, that the option was now  mine (active or not) and it killed my once-working Toolkit option. Since I rely on the running balance, I had no choice but to turn it on and have to deal with the irregularities.

Why, when the Toolkit version, which they could've adopted, worked flawlessly? /r

For a company that has excellent budgeting philosophies, they suck out loud at actually understanding how the program [should] work[s].

Move Light Sound Life  I always just refreshed when getting a notification so assumed if I didn't, I wouldn't get the new feature. I got a notification, did not refresh.  As an experiment, I just now opened YNAB.  Toolkit's RB is on.  I disabled Toolkit RB but did not refresh.  Instead, I closed YNAB then re-opened.  No running balance at all.  I then selected Running Balance from the Toolkit.  Again, I did not refresh.  I closed then re-opened YNAB.  I now have Toolkit's RB back.  Maybe the notification I got wasn't about the running balance. 🤷‍♀️

Superbone Thank you for clarifying, but I'm not sure I understand. The Toolkit running balance shows out of order, as well? Sorting by the Balance column in YNAB puts the transactions in default order (by date, with transactions sorted from largest inflow to largest outflow), not in order by the account balance. Sorry if this is a silly question! I'll try to add the toolkit to play with this evening.

Superbone Thank you. I have been really wanting to go find out what the Toolkit use to do, because it never bothered me. When I was actually using it, it gave me the info I needed when I needed it. Obviously, if I was sorting by categories, I wasn't even looking at the running balance.

Faness I suppose the issue is that, in the past, sorting by date in YNAB had always (IME) put transactions in the order of date, with largest outflow/inflow as part of that. I will even take the risk of saying always (even after other sorts) because it was strange for me, and I took note.

Now, sorting by date includes secondary sorting, and evidently the balance column takes care of the amounts. Frankly, this change is new. I, for one, did not expect the addition of a running balance column to change the sorting rules of another column.

Just because I like to be sure, though, could someone with the Toolkit still working check my assessment of the situation? Does sorting by date (the old way) really put transactions in date order by largest outflow/inflow?

I don't mind being wrong - just trying to figure it out so I can give useful feedback. I hate not being able to check.

Move Light Sound Life The sorting logic has not changed, but the secondary sort features have never been well known. It's not common to sort by factors other than date, so it doesn't come up often. There has been a post or two in the forum where users asked why transactions were appearing in a certain order (differently after clicking a certain column), and the sorting logic was to blame. 

Faness I sort by category all the time, but usually it's in the All Accounts register, where the running balance is moot. 

So, are you saying that before the running balance got implemented, the only way to put the account register back to default order was by sorting outflow: small->large, then inflow large->small, then date? Because I would only ever sort by date to get back to normal, and the Toolkit running balance made sense just fine in that context. 

I wish I could fiddle with it and figure out why. Is it the sort? Did it take into account different transaction orders on the same day? Did I just never have conflicting transactions? It was intuitive, and I'm glad you (and I hope others on the development team) will research it. 

A suggestion: when trying to build things, researching other instances of similar things is helpful when evaluating the approach. Since you've evidently got a lot of cool things coming down the pipeline, it might be good to see how the Toolkit works, since it exists to solve many of the problems I hope you will be addressing.

Move Light Sound Life Does this help answer your question? I'm only sorted by date here. I don't have anything to compare it to, since I never used it in YNAB4 and this is the first time I've turned it on in Toolkit.

Move Light Sound Life Yes, clicking on the outflow column then the date column is how the default sort was restored. Most users don't notice the secondary sort in action. It only sticks out if there's multiple transactions in a single day and sorting by category, payee or memo changes the original sort order. Even then, unless you were specifically looking for the largest inflow to largest outflow order, there was nothing to indicate they had been sorted differently.

The running balance is now making it more apparent because there's a number trail to follow. Clicking on the Balance column switches the order back to the default, which is an option we never had in the past.

Faness Just FYI, I've had the Toolkit's running balance on for half a year, and I never noticed the issue.

Faness said:
The running balance is now making it more apparent because there's a number trail to follow.

Move Light Sound Life It sounds like the toolkit running balance recalculated each time the sort order was changed. I didn't have the chance to see it in action myself, but we're steadily collecting the feedback we've seen for this feature.

Superbone nolesrule What does this act like in 4, out of curiosity?

WordTenor I hadn't ran YNAB 4 in a very long time. I just fired it up. I rarely used running balance in 4 and now I realize why. Scheduled transactions don't allow a running balance in 4. The funny thing is that the running balance in the 4 account register behaves exactly like it does in the nYNAB toolkit! It sorts correctly in the Date sort and doesn't allow you to sort by Balance.

WordTenor There is no secondary sort in YNAB4. The column you click on solely determines the sorting order.

Personally, I don't see the need for a secondary sort. How many transaction on a date can there possibly be?

nolesrule If there's more than one, and it doesn't match the bank's order entry, it's annoying. If there are more than two  -- this happens to me a lot when I order multiple items from Amazon and orders are split, on top of daily transactions -- it's annoying to the point that I start editing dates to force an order.

It's off topic a bit, but it would be nice if YNAB respected my entry order and allowed me to reorder intraday to an arbitrary order apart from any characteristics of the transactions.

nolesrule I mean for running balance as well. What happens when you sort the register?

RIP_MSMoney Yes, sorry for the confusion! nolesrule asked for a use case for the secondary sorting. Thank you for providing the details for the change you mentioned! We're taking all feedback into consideration to decide on the best way to move forward. 

Tomato Inspector In your account register, click on view (between the toggles for reconciled and filter.

Tomato Inspector Here's a link to the Running Balance Help Doc.

Move Light Sound Life I'm checking with a colleague to make sure this is expected behavior!

Faness and the Toolkit pulls through again! Note: With the new Toolkit release, some kind, volunteer developer has made it so that the native running balance will be checked globally if you had previously used the Toolkit's running balance. 

YNAB, I still think making it a global option should be included natively. :)

minion1066 Live for a select few. It’s YNAB’s standard slow rollout.

Ivory Piccolo I've had no problem turning it off

Ivory Piccolo  Check your toolkit settings. If you used to use the old one, it will be automatically checked across accounts.

Hi Ivory Piccolo !

If you sort by most recent, the running balance should be correct unless it was sorted by another factor as well (such as category, payee, etc.). You should also be able to turn it off by unchecking the "Show Running Balance" option under "View" in the account register.

I totally understand HOW to make it work, my post is that despite doing the right things, it wasn't working. I had to completely disable the toolkit completely (not just turn off the running balance feature)  to make the YNAB view balance stop coming back even after unchecking VIEW BALANCE from every account multiple times. Using Chrome browser - not sure it that was part of the issue. Anyway...very buggy release. I've gone back to the toolkit because it just works.

Ivory Piccolo The Toolkit released a global option to make the running balance show in every account. That feature was automatically turned on for users who used the toolkit running balance in the past, so that it didn't have to be turned on for each account individually - they were trying to streamline that process. Disabling the toolkit completely turned off that toolkit option.

Move Light Sound Life Faness That also wasn't it. As mentioned, I had the toolkit option off but every time I unchecked View Running Balance ( the YNAB one) it would come back on refresh. Anyway, moving on, the toolkit one is more intuitive, better featured, and less buggy so that is the one I prefer.

gte037p I hate the "reconcile to today" approach. I won't do it unless institutions stop generating statements. Having to unclear and reclear grates. but I guess that's part of the price I pay for not running my finances the way YNAB wants to dictate.

gte037p You shouldn't be making adjustment transactions on a routine basis.

Here's what I don't understand -- Since you are verifying against a statement, you clearly do not trust the bank's website to give completely accurate information -- absolutely your call. But yet, you trust those downloaded transactions from the same website?

Accepting that the statement is the only absolutely reliable source of information, the very first thing you should do is to unclear every single one of those imported transactions so you have an easy "check mark" while verifying against your statement. (The select-all feature will make this a trivial process.)

dakinemaui I wouldn’t say that’s it’s not trusting the bank, per se, just that the statement is more of an official milestone. If, for some reason, there were a dispute with the bank, I’d rather be able to say “On the 11/25 statement you said that my balance was $123.45” rather than “At 12:45PM on 11/25 your site said that my balance was $123.45.”

dakinemaui  adjustments need to be made on a routine basis for many accounts where there is no "transaction" to represent the current value such as investment accounts or balances with an interest vs principal (mortgage, student loans, 401k, stocks accounts, etc.) 

Also, maybe you haven't encountered this issue yet (been using ynab for 8 years myself), but if you get a month or two behind in reconciling your credit card you will inevitably find a rogue transaction that you missed or that popped up in a different statement due to delay in the charge clearing. 

If you have this issue, then how do you hunt down the out of balance amount within 200 or transactions or so? 

Well, you go to your statement where you reconcile to the last un-reconciled statement and begin to hunt down the charge.  Hence the value of reconciling to a date.  Not to be a "who moved my cheese guy" but with YNAB4 you picked the date and it filtered and show you the balance of "cleared" transactions through that date (but would display the uncleared transactions so that you can clear them (especially important when some transactions could fall on either side of the statement closing date).

Habanero Salsa Seems like you would still want to clear using the statement rather than rely on any of the auto-cleared functionality. How else can you be certain the transactions that are cleared in YNAB do, in fact, map to that official milestone?

dakinemaui I’m willing to roll the dice that when 50 previously examined transactions on my side match, to the penny, with 50 previously examined transactions on the bank’s side, it isn’t mere chance. Or, more so, that two or more such transactions haven’t been altered after the fact such they net to $0.00.

And I look both ways when crossing a one way street, so I have a pretty low threshold.

gte037p OK, so your adjustment transactions have nothing to do with the reconciliation workflow. Both YNAB4 and nYNAB are identical in this respect.

Here's the thing, though: even if you had a statement date filter, there would still be issues. I know this because this is precisely why I stopped reconciling to statements with YNAB4. Transactions that were auto-cleared (via import) were within the statement date range in YNAB (and therefore included), but were not listed on the statement; obviously a mismatch in spite of the "statement date" input you want YNAB to implement.

I decided it was less work to leverage the auto-clear/web register rather than unclear transactions & verify each line against the statement. Again, this is in YNAB4 with its built-in Statement Date filter.

dakinemaui the way YNAB4 handled reconciliation was better because it allowed you to input a date. 

My hope in posting here is to draw attention to the fact that this "feature" of seeing the balance is all for the purpose of helping folks to reconcile, but the nYNAB doesn't care about reconciling based on statements or periods of time in the past so an ongoing balance isn't really that valuable

Let us hope that someone at YNAB might consider adding back a reconciling to a date.

gte037p For me the primary benefit of running balance is forward looking. I can see the impact of scheduled transactions on each account and determine if I need money.

Its role in reconciling is very much secondary but it was useful in narrowing down where a reconciling difference might be in an account that hadn't been reconciled for a long while. I have no knowledge of the US banking system but in the UK system there is no merit in waiting for a statement before reconciling. Our credit cards still issue statements but for many current (checking) accounts they are no longer standard.

monkeyhanger I wasn't aware of UK banks not issuing statements.  I assume many consumers don't review their statements regardless.  

I budget a month in advance and have 3-to-6 months of savings so I'm not particularly concerned about if I have enough in my accounts, but I can appreciate wanting to see what the balance will be due to upcoming transactions.  

gte037p I also budget a month in advance and have savings. It's not necessarily a scarcity issue. The account I chose to keep my money in depends on interest rates etc so having a running balance on my current account simply lets me optimise my money management.

Lots of customers DO review their accounts and transactions. There's just been a push to save paper and have electronic records instead. If you specifically request it you can get paper statements from most banks but to be honest they just go straight into my filing cabinet. I've already done everything I need to do online.

monkeyhanger FYI, I'm in the US and do exactly as you do. We aren't that different. 🙂 Monthly statements are just an old-fashioned thing at this point in my world. They don't do anything for me.

gte037p 

It's possible to reconcile your accounts to a given statement date, but we don't suggest it. YNAB focuses on the money you have in your account today, so there isn't an option to automatically reconcile to a date in the past.

That said, if you still want to reconcile against your statement balance, here's how:

1. Mark all transactions in your account register that occur after your statement's closing date as uncleared (select those transactions and hit the "c" key on your keyboard to do this with multiple transactions at once).
2. Click the reconcile button at the top right of your budget and enter the statement balance instead of your current account balance.
3. Clear transactions from before that statement date until the Cleared balance of your (YNAB) account matches your statement balance - YNAB will automatically show you how close those balances are.

We don't currently have plans to change how reconciling functions, but you can submit a Feature Request to let our Product Team know you'd like to see the option to reconcile to a date.

Faness Thank you support.  I know how  to reconcile to a date.  That has never been an issue.  I'm suggesting that it is a useful feature.

It seems, though, that I am in the minority here.  So "good job" to the YNAB team for building an upgraded product with less features, charging more, and then building a tribe behind it.  It might appear that I am being sarcastic, but I'm not.

gte037p I would say more melodramatic than sarcastic. I still really don't understand what the need or want is for reconciling to a certain date or statement. I'm a frequent reconciler so maybe that's part of it.

Superbone I want to be able to point to a concrete point in time at which the bank and I definitively agreed on how much money is in the account. “As of of November 26 statement” is more concrete than “at 10:51AM on November 26,” particularly with pending transactions that will probably clear today. 
 

If you don’t want or need that, that’s cool. I want that, so that’s how I do it in YNAB, just like I did in YNAB4. 

Superbone Some people just choose to do so. They're just upset they have to manually unclear transactions, which takes approximately four clicks. Same reason we b!tch about having to manually release funds from an Income Next Month category.

EDIT: and I wouldn't hold my breath on either ever changing.

Habanero Salsa Thank you for the explanation. And I agree with dakinemaui that it is yet another feature YNAB chose to remove like Rule 4 and the ability to fund next month with this month's funds built into the software. I'm perfectly fine with giving users options but unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be YNAB's current path. Those of us that want these things are forced to work around them. I am also working around their new CC handling but luckily there is a one-time set up solution for that.

It is a conundrum for us users. YNAB is pushing their one true way without options and yet there are no better alternatives available to us.

MsTJ The running balance fuss is that the native one sometimes displays an apparently nonsensical result if you've sorted your data in a particular way. If you know this is going to happen then you will be ready for it

Hi Aquamarine Battery !

I'm glad you like the running balance feature! You can let our Product Team know any other features you'd like to see by submitting a Feature Request. :)

Hi Slate Gray Colt !

Sorry for the trouble! There isn't an option to turn the Running Balance on for all accounts at once. However, once turned on it shouldn't turn off unless you delete your cookies or use a different browser. You can let our Product Team know you'd like to see an option to turn the Running Balance on faster by submitting a Feature Request.