Can't unapprove or uncategorize or edit transaction without approving???
YNAB has a special high priority workflow for things that are unapproved and/or uncategorized. I love it, it helps put things in my face that I need to deal with and work on.
Unfortunately, when using YNAB, I've noticed that if I change anything about an unapproved transaction at all, it only gives me the option to approve or cancel the transaction. I can't change anything without approving it. Not even a memo!
Why does this matter to me?
If a transaction is no longer showing in this list, it's effectively out of sight, out of mind, and hard to find in the mass of transactions that no longer show up here.
What do I propose?
Two things:
- The ability to move something into an uncategorized state.
- That a user can toggle in the settings whether or not things are auto-approved on save.
If I had the ability to approve when I wanted to approve, I can find work arounds to the uncategorized problem, but they are only work arounds.
Here are some times when these features would be helpful to me:
- Accidentally put the wrong category or payee on an incoming transaction? Or just accidentally hit enter early while you are editing something? YNAB doesn't know that, and the thing disappears immediately from your list of urgent work, because it's automatically approved. Not good at all.
- Amazon payments for purchases come in from the bank haphazardly as things are shipped, and always with the category of the last purchase that was handled in YNAB. We buy a lot of things from Amazon. They take time to handle, and are hard to trace back to the actual order. We have to look these up on our two separate Amazon accounts to figure out what order they are from and therefore the category they belong in. The incoming transaction category is almost always wrong, and until it can be researched the transaction shouldn't really be categorized. BUT I can't reflect that on the transaction, instead it's muddying up my budget categories. And if I were to change the category to some kind of holding category, it would APPROVE the transaction, and it would disappear from the list of items which need dealing with, since I don't have control of when the transaction is approved, any change approves it.
- CHOOSE WHEN TO APPROVE: We have scheduled transactions every 2 weeks and we write an old-fashioned paper check. When we write the check, we add the check number to the memo field. Now it's "gone". Sure, it's not cleared, but there is no easy way to add uncleared transactions to this working list so that I can find it easily when the check actually clears the bank so I can match the transactions up. I do add a flag, but either searching for uncleared or searching for a flag require that I leave my workflow and search through a boatload of old transactions to find what I'm looking for. Not fun. If I didn't approve these checks, they'd hang out in my high priority list until the matching bank transaction came through. OR if I could click a check box and add uncleared transactions to this working list, that would be awesome too.
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For the last point at least, you can order the transactions by uncleared/cleared so it puts all the transactions that may have been approved but not cleared with the bank at the top of the list.
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Ceeses I can do that - but it still takes me away from my current workflow to do that. And once I order the list that way, finding the other transaction in order to match them is hard, because it won't sort to the top with the other one. It's just messy.
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If you don't know what category to use, consider leaving it blank (delete the imported category). Uncategorized transactions have their own attention-calling mechanism.
FWIW, YNAB was designed for manual entry to be the primary mechanism. You wouldn't have this issue with imported transactions if you did that. (They would simply match.)
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dakinemaui As far as I can tell there is no way to delete the imported category. Once I put a category in, or it automatically assigns one, it always must have a category. That is why the ability to "uncategorize" is one of the two things I'd like to see.
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dakinemaui Oh I found it. I assumed that removing the category would be an option on the drop down list, I actually had to hit delete while the category field had focus. That wasn't intuitive, and I'm assuming I probably can only to that on the browser, not the phone app.
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dakinemaui also - we can't enter the amazon transactions accurately until they come in. They will rarely match. We can place an order for 10 items, and they might all ship at once and the transaction would come in matching what we thought we were spending - but usually they ship in unpredictable groups. 10 items in 1 order could be any number of shipments between 1 and 10, and separate transactions coming through the bank for each one.
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