Newbie here - Credit card tracking hurts my head
New to YNAB. I've never maintained a great budget, but at the same time I've always made sure I don't spend more than what I currently have. That being said, I can't seem to wrap my head around how YNAB handles credit card transactions, in particular, payments. I have a number of inflows from automatic credit card payments and they are currently budgeted as "inflow: to be budgeted" but that doesn't make sense, because that's not money I have.
I've flipped through a couple YNAB articles and other forum posts but I think I keep getting myself more confused. If someone could post either a link to a great description of how credit card transactions are handled or provide a summary yourself, that would be fantastic. My budget and I would be forever thankful.
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Credit Card payments should be entered into YNAB as a transfer from your checking account to your credit card account with no category. It's not going to import that way because your credit card company doesn't see it as a transfer. I do 100% manual entry with no import so someone else will have to explain how to deal with the import and matching.
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jenmas I'm starting to think that the manual import/transfer may be the way to go on this. My only issue now is going through all of my transactions and trying to fix the chaos. Thanks for your comment.
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jenmas
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Nick True has a great video on YouTube that explains the credit card handling very well
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satcook Yes, Nick True. I was looking to see if anyone mentioned it. He is the one that broke it down for me. His explanation of Ynab itself convinced me that Ynab was a great option for me. They should hire him to be apart of their team. ( he may already be a team member, I don't know) Ynab online classes help too, but I didn't know about them at the time as a newbie
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Nick C Sounds like you YNAB may be trying to be smart about categorizing these based on previous categorizations you've made. change the payee to be a transfer from your checking and you should be golden.
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Victor Rodriguez Manual entry is always going to be the most accurate, but YNAB remembers when you change the payee to a transfer and will do it again in the future.
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YNAB's online credit card workshops/webinars can be found here. You can attend any of them multiple times if it doesn't click the first time around; do the same with the Nick True video mentioned above (below?) if needed - it took me a couple of repetitions before the light bulb came on. 🙂
