Nicole My worry is that, like the user above, YNAB isn't actually showing the accurate current balance of accounts either because of pending transactions of the 8-hour refresh window. I have been hoping to use YNAB as a real-time accurate reflection of my budgets and where money is available and moving, but the absence of pending or manual account sync features mean that it's not an accurate real-time reflection. You say it could take an FI up to 2 days to clear/post and then up to another 24 hours (or really 8 hours) for YNAB to post the transaction. That's up to a THREE DAY delay! 

This has been frustrating because I check my YNAB to see if I have room in a budget to spend, only to find out later that because a transaction was pending or it hadn't been at least 8 hours since my last update, I spent money I didn't have. I know this has been a topic brought over the last many months on many different posts, but the lack of real-time sync or pending transaction accounting is one of the biggest drawbacks of YNAB for me.

Having to wait 1-3 days for a transaction, income, etc. to post in YNAB defeats the point of using YNAB to accurately and quickly manage spending and budgets. YNAB becomes more of a weekly or monthly reconciliation tool than a day-to-day, shopping trip-to-shopping trip cash flow and budget management tool.

I'd love to be able to whip out YNAB on my phone at a store and see accurate information about budgets, income, etc. that include pending transactions so that I don't make decisions based on YNAB's depiction of my finances rather than a tool that shows includes not-yet-cleared-but-already-spent-and-still-valid depictions of my budgets and available funds. Yes, I could just look at my accounts on the FI's website, or I could look at my accounts in real-time on another budgeting app. Regardless, using YNAB as that kind of tool is defeated.

YNAB offers so much that no other tool does and we pay a good price for those features. But this is one of those features that almost ruins it for me. Access to accurate information in real-time is essential, and I don't know why it's taken so long for this feature to continue to not work its way through the development pipeline.

Cyan Saxophone my YNAB is always 100% up to date because I do 100% manual entry with no bank syncing at all.

jenmas Exactly. That's the only way to get 100% accurate and real-time info at this point. But if YNAB is going to invest so deeply in having this bank import feature (which I think YNAB needs to in order to be competitive), then its syncing should be as accurate and timely as manual entry. Automation with notable delays is almost worse than no automation at all (though I'd obviously prefer real-time, manual synced automation so that I don't have to type in each transaction manually).

jenmas I think it's funny that people get up in arms about direct import.  It takes me 5-20 seconds to input a transaction on my phone, maybe 2 minutes if I want to split out categories from a big, general store (groceries, household, car maintenance, treats, gifts).  Surely direct import can't actually be faster than that, because you still have to click and wait, then categorize.  And it's not like it will know your splits, so you still have to do that manually.

Cyan Saxophone  You’ve misunderstood why they have direct import. They offered file based importing to speed up the reconciliation process and enable users to more quickly find errors in their manual input. They chose (poorly, IMO) to include a direct import option in this version to save users the additional trouble of downloading the file from their bank. 

Import, file based or direct, was never intended to take the place of manual entry, and it has been programmed with that purpose in mind. If you plan to use the software differently than YNAB intends for you to use the software, some parts aren’t going to work as well as you’d like them to.

Move Light Sound Life All true, but we spend $8-10,000 per month on our credit card.  It would be a full time job inputting every transaction.  Maybe we should just spend less... :-)

Slate Blue Mare Is none of that something you can schedule to recur? We only have to input things like food/supplies/discretionary purchases. The rest are bills that, even if we don't know the amount, the scheduled transaction means most of the data is right. Besides, a quick 2 clicks on the file based importing matches the info for me.

Slate Blue Mare I can spend $10,000 on a single transaction, and I can spend $10 in 1,000 transactions. Number of transactions is the only relevant thing.