
Credit Card Outflow/Inflow & Positive/Negative
Hi. I have two issues.
First, YNAB credit card account is not tracking budgeted purchases and correspondingly transferring those purchases to the credit card. My balance seems stuck on zero regardless of expenses. Is there a feature that must be selected to turn this on?
Two, payments to my credit card (should be negative and bring my balance closer to zero) show up as a positive number.
If i spent $500 on my credit card then pay off $500. The balance should be $0. For some reason YNAB makes the balance $1,000 instead. I've played around by making it -$500 when i pay the credit card which makes the credit card account look accurate... but then the checking account is off.
If my credit balance is $500 and i want to pay $500 from my checking account. My checking account is at $2,000. I'm stuck with:
Having the credit card account incorrectly have inflow of $500 and total balance of $1,000. In this scenario my checking account goes from $2,000 to $1,500.
If i enter the payment as -$500 then my credit card account is correct at $0 but my checking account now has a +500 inflow and it is at $2,500.
What have i done incorrectly?
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The card category and the register are two different things. One should be positive (the category) and one should be negative (the register). When you make a payment, the category becomes less positive, and the register balance becomes less negative.
It's not entirely clear from your explanation which one of these two you are looking at, or if your expectations are mismatched--if you are expecting the balance in the budget to be negative, then yes, you'll see something you aren't expecting in the budget. -
Green Keyboard said:
I have never actually seen my credit card balance be red, its always green and always increasing.This makes me think you don’t understand the credit card category. Your credit card balance is only able to be green at the top of the register, which you shouldn’t need to look at very often (and there it will usually be red). Well and I suppose in the “accounts” page on the mobile app, you'll see it green or red also. But the budget category should always be gray or green, and it increases as you spend. Can you please clarify or show screenshots of the “green balance” you see?
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To me, it seems the problem is when you make a purchase with your card, your $10 bread example, it gets entered as a positive amount instead of negative. So instead of taking your card balance negative, it becomes positive. Which then changes completely the way the budget works (it gives you more dollars to budget).
Are you using auto-importing? Sometimes this wrongfully imports outflows with a positive sign instead of negative. But normally, YNAB support can solve that.