Coming soon: Progress Bars
One of the biggest questions your budget is designed to answer is: "How'm I doing?"
How close am I to a savings goal? Am I on track to spend my whole grocery budget long before the month is over?
What if there were a way to take a quick look at your budget and answer those questions and many more? Enter progress bars.
With progress bars turned on in your budget, you can see how much you have budgeted and spent for each category — as well as your progress towards your goal, if you have one set.
Progress bars aren't showing any new information that you couldn't already find somewhere in your budget, but they take a lot of useful info and display in a highly condensed, intuitive form.
These progress bars reflect the goals, budgeting and spending you do in your categories each month, so they're updated automatically by these actions. In other words, there's no manually adjusting the bars themselves. Only changing the goal, budgeted, and spending transactions can do that.
This is a web-only feature for now, but will be coming to mobile later this year. It's also completely optional: you can show or hide progress bars at any time by clicking the toggle in the upper-right-hand corner.
There's a lot going on here
Progress bars are created and updated by the Goals, Budgeting, and Activity on a category. There are three parts to a progress bar:
- the number of sections in the bar, which represents the time period of the month and/or goal
- the solid color of the sections, which represents the budgeting in the category
- the striped color of the sections, which represents the spending in the category
If you're not seeing progress bars in your budget yet, you will very soon. And there's so much more to them that I can cover in a short introductory forum post. Have fun playing around with them, and let us know if you run into any trouble or have any questions about how they work.
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Can't wait! Looking forward to this.
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Glad it's optional! I might play with them, but sometimes I don't want information overload - or rather, I'd just focus on something else . Thanks, YNAB!
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LOVE the bars. Very cool.
One nit: if you do not have a goal on the category, then the text is redundant. It simply says in more words what the next couple columns are showing you anyway.
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I got the progress bars and the move money logger this week, nice job YNAB team.
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1) Progress bars . . . Thanks for making them optional. Just got them today, but find they just clutter the screen without adding any value (for me, at least, YMMV).
2) Recent Moves . . . this is the addition I've seen others request and thought I didn't need. But I really like how it's implemented. Well done.
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I like this. I am all about visuals. Looks like what simple had. It would be great if they were different colors per category. It will definitely be most useful in the app where you have a smaller screen.
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Can someone confirm if it's intended design that the font of category names seem to get bigger when progress bars are enabled?
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Green Orca I believe that is intentional. The idea is: show more categories on the screen in collapsed mode, but make the name of the category stand out more compared to the explanatory text in expanded (progress bar) mode.
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I see the money moves option. Are the progress bars supposed to show under the category item or on the right where you set goals, etc.?
Thanks.
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bookyarncafe You'll see progress bars in the categories when you turn them on, and you'll see them in the Inspector to the right when you select a category. They'll look like this:
You can turn the progress bars on or off in your budget toolbar:
Check out this HelpDoc for details! :)
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