YNAB newbie - does the order of matching transactions vs reconciliation matter?
Hello! I manually enter all transactions but use auto-import to check and match them.
Say I enter a transaction (either spending from an account or paying off my credit card) and then reconcile my account. Will YNAB still match the transactions I enter, even though they are now locked, with the ones they import from the bank?
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Yes.
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Yes to your final question. No to your title question.
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dakinemaui Good point! 😄I had forgotten about the title question which made my minimalist answer quite ambiguous. I suppose the shortest answer would have been "No and yes." but that would have been dependent on the order the questions were asked. And, yes, I have too much time on my hands.
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Thank you both!
A follow-up question. I have a monthly scheduled transaction (Netflix on the 16th of the month). Today is Dec 16th and so I approved the transaction when prompted. However, the money hasn't actually been charged to my credit card yet (it usually varies by a day or so, and probably will be charged tomorrow). So now I've approved the scheduled transaction, but I cannot reconcile my accounts as my credit card hasn't been charged yet. What do people usually do in this situation? 1) Wait to approve the scheduled transaction until the account has actually been charged? 2) Approve the scheduled transaction now and wait to reconcile until the money has actually been charged? 3) Something else?
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Eucalyptus forest you can reconcile now. At the top of your account page in YNAB it shows a "working balance" and "cleared balance." You always want to reconcile to the cleared balance, because reconciling is literally saying "my bank and YNAB are in agreement that these charges have cleared my account." The working balance includes transactions you have entered but that haven't cleared your bank yet, just like your bank "available" balance may include pending charges that haven't fully cleared yet.
The convenience of online banking and being able to view your account balances at any time (vs the old days when you HAD to wait for your paper statement to come in the mail) is why most people reconcile at least weekly, if not multiple times a week.
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Eucalyptus forest You should be using the "cleared" status marker for your transactions. On the web app, it is the little C on the far right. In this case, you would not check the cleared mark, as it has not cleared your bank yet. So it will come out of your working balance for the account, but not cleared balance. The cleared balance is what you reconcile to.
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Eucalyptus forest also, "approving" the transaction and "clearing" it are not the same thing. Approving a scheduled transaction is literally just saying "yes, I planned to make this transaction and I have, please add it to my register." It is not cleared (the gray/green "c" on the right margin) until you manually mark it so after verifying it is posted to your bank, or it will be automatically marked as cleared if you use direct or file-based importing.
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This is helpful, thank you. And makes perfect sense for my credit card, which I've now reconciled to the cleared (not working) balance.
Looking at my checking account, though, I have a question. My bank lists my checking account balance as X, where X includes the results of 2 pending transactions. I have also entered these transactions manually into YNAB, so they both show up as not cleared transactions. So my account in YNAB shows both a cleared balance and a working balance. In this case, the YNAB working balance is what matches my bank account, since my bank account accounts for those two transactions in its display of the available checking account balance. Here, how /when would I reconcile?
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Eucalyptus forest I would simply compute the bank's cleared balance (add any pending outflow amounts).
On many web sites, a running balance can be shown that excludes pending transactions. Might be an option.
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dakinemaui So I should reconcile YNAB cleared balance to my bank's available balance minus pending transactions?
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Eucalyptus forest You can do it either way. If the bank balance includes the pending transactions, you could manually clear them and reconcile to the bank balance. When the pending transactions import into YNAB, they'll be matched with the existing transactions and you would just approve them.
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Superbone I really hesitate to clear transactions in YNAB before they're actually cleared (in the real world), because the reconciliation locks those transactions. If they ever do change in the real world, they will NOT match. The reconciliation "line in the sand" no longer restricts the timeframe of errors. I'd recommend that anyone going down this road should flag those pending transactions for later comparison -- if they've later cleared for the same value, unflag them; otherwise delete/edit them.
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Eucalyptus forest said:
So I should reconcile YNAB cleared balance to my bank's available balance minus pending transactionsYes.
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dakinemaui Thanks for all your help!
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Thanks everyone!
