How to track credits on credit card
My credit card reimburses me for certain purchases and I'm wondering what's the better way to flag those credits - as Inflow:To Be Budgeted, or as positive allocations toward the category the initial purchase was made against?
For example: I've put $500 towards my Groceries category for the month. I purchased $80 worth of groceries, and flagged the transaction as a debit against the Groceries category. My credit card immediately reimbursed me $80 for the purchase. Should I flag that reimbursement transaction as Inflow, or Groceries?
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It's really up to you! It depends on how you think about the money.
In the case of the groceries, if you think of it as, "I don't need to budget as much for/can spend more on groceries because of my credit card rewards," then budget the reimbursement back to the Groceries category.
If you think of it as, "Because of this credit card rewards program, I can budget my regular amount for groceries and have more income to spend on whatever I like," categorize it as Inflow: To be Budgeted.
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Thanks! My biggest concern was that I not screw up YNAB's tracking of my credit card balance and how much it sets aside for my next statement. The auto-tracking has been off before and I've had to pull funds from other categories to balance everything out - just don't want to go through that again.
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Thank you for this! I just had a similar situation, and was wondering what to do. What I seem to have settled on is having the transaction go to the category, and then moving that money from the category to TBB/wherever I want it to go. It looks like if I do it that way, the magic moving money to/from the card/category lines up correctly, whereas if I don't move it to the category before moving the money to TBB, the available amount to pay the credit card stays the same.
I'm not following how to manage the cash flow myself if I send it to TBB (and it doesn't seem to show up in TBB when I do that?), so I think this is the method I'll use going forward.
