Veronica You're missing the key complaint. 

One complaint might be that YNAB isn't making the features a particular user wants.  That's what you are addressing.  You make very fair points, on which reasonable minds can differ.  But that's not the heart of the criticism.

The compliant is that YNAB is just not improving the product at a reasonable pace.  I would be ok with "We're prioritizing other features because xyz reasons".  What really is inexcusable is the lack of product development, of any kind. 

I've been in SaaS start ups for awhile now.  You have a robust engineering and product team.  You should be shipping more features and iterating on existing features more quickly.  

Everyone would be more patient if it appeared that YNAB was actually making progress.  

Tan Wildebeest Forest Green Stallion Maybe she isnt responding because there isnt an "inexcusable lack of development". If you go through the Release Notes (yes, you have to actually research and look. The fact I spent the time to do this shows how much I let this forum get under my skin.) YNAB is averaging 2 feature releases a Month since last year. Not bug fixes. Feature releases. I dont know if you're all discounting these features because you didnt ask for them, because you didnt want them or because you don't like them. Maybe you havent been using YNAB long enough to see them all? Maybe they're not "big" enough for you. Regardless of the reason though, they're there. If you're not willing to recognize what YNAB has already done, I dont think it's fair to speak on what they havent done. Or, if the "slow" progress is really that big of an issue, stop giving them your money and filling the forum with these repetitive asks for features they said they arent planning.

Til Debt Do Us Part Thanks for this, you saved me the trouble. People generally vastly underestimate the resource requirements of making changes to widely-used and complex software. The cost of change is not related to the change itself, but the complexity of the thing you're changing, paraphrased from Dave McComb's The Software Wasteland, but a quote I really like.

SaaS isn't necessarily correct;ated with fast iteration and feature-development. In fact the opposite can be true, because with traditional software the customer/client can choose when and how to adopt a new version. With SaaS, this isn't possible, which adds testing cycles (particularly regression, which while is relatively easy to automate still steals cycles from resources that would otherwise be developing). 

If you're a product manager at a start-up, or releasing new SaaS features that can be adopted or ignored because they're a new product, then you don't have to worry too much about regression testing until you make version changes. Even then if the customer can choose to adopt or reject the new version, because they can do their own testing before implementation, so you get additional comfort. But if you're changing a product used by hundreds of thousands of people who MUST adopt the change (SaaS model), it's likely a huge time vampire and quite costly if you include the fixes needed both before and after release. Reading about Kanban theory on wikipedia doesn't make one a product management expert. And SaaS is banded about often by people who actually have no idea what it is.

One other thing - I've seen YNAB advertise a few jobs in the development team over the years, and they really do look after their staff in terms of benefits and work/life balance. So while many companies push out features more frequently (perhaps with more issues) I think I'd rather support a company that cares about it's workforce than one that fixates on its turndown rate - usually correlated with a burnout rate - that's an engineer joke...

Woolloomooloo We've been having this same discussion for 4+ years.  Not 4 days, not 4 weeks, not 4 months. 4 years. We would expect some kind of serious progress over that kind of timeframe. Took 4 years to add 2 goals.

And some of us have extensive experience developing SaaS and Web Applications. We don't need it explained to us.

Til Debt Do Us Part said:
YNAB is averaging 2 feature releases a Month since last year. Not bug fixes. Feature releases.

Please list a single new feature that was released since last year. Not bug fixes. Feature releases. (Don't even start with Apple Sign-On instead of signing on with a password. Something of substance, please.)

Some of us do actually research and look... and are disheartened.

dakinemaui That's you discounting the feature because you didnt ask for it or because you dont like it? I can only imagine the amount of "substance" necessary to meet Apple requirements. I can also imagine the number of people who said "No fair! People can login with Google but I want to log in with Apple". I strongly believe that the features you want just arent requested by the masses. You're out numbered. 

Experienced users arent asking for a fix for SFTF because they know what it is and how to deal with it and new users arent asking because they dont know. So focusing on first time user needs seems like the best way to get what you want, but others are still upset by this for some reason. 

Based on your criteria, nothing other than a major change would make you happy (though, it can be argued that sign in with Apple Is major, but whatever). Just to address your question though, the new payee search feature functions how a lot of you requested now (I'm on my phone or I'd bother linking that thread), the new report colors are really nice and split transactions through the API is a big deal. 

Obviously you know how averages work and the three I mentioned dont have "substance" to you but, again, they're still there. 

Til Debt Do Us Part 

Til Debt Do Us Part said:
Experienced users arent asking for a fix for SFTF because they know what it is and how to deal with it and new users arent asking because they dont know.

 It'd sure be nice to not have to mention it every single damn time there's an explanation about budgeting money to future months (it should be noted this isn't the only "help" place, official or otherwise, where people ask for assistance with YNAB).

Also, most experienced users have kinda given up on asking for things at this point. This thread just shows that we haven't gone away since we saw an opportunity to be heard and tried to take advantage. Personally I don't bother with the most recent incarnation of the feature request form because it's just plain tedious. I'd rather freeform a request, and if someone has questions, they can reach out.

Blue Wildcat I wasn't excluding the people in those groups. I was pointing out YNAB was excluding a major group of users who do not fit into any of those groups.

WordTenor My biggest irritant is when I’m modifying a transaction and I select Manage Payees in the Payee field and make my changes and come back out and it doesn’t automatically put this modified payee in the field! In fact, it still shows the same payee when I started the change! I have to then type in the payee I just modified. Maddening.

lazynooblet For what it's worth, the income for next month workflow is a must for me and there's a pretty simple workaround. It only requires a few extra clicks a month. All my income flows into an Income for Next Month category automatically and then it's just a simple matter of releasing the funds to To Be Budgeted at the end of the month and budgeting all of next month with a few clicks using the quick budget functionality. Search the forum for "income for next month" for more details if you're interested.

WordTenor Well said!

WordTenor 

Veronica said:
First Time Users (aiming to reduce that steep learning curve to use the app

 They plan to do exactly what you've mentioned. 

dakinemaui I don't know how much you like your day job but can we put you in charge of the YNAB development team?

Superbone Being in charge of developers is like herding cats. Takes a stronger will than I have. :-)

Part of my job is herding developers. But it's also coming up with workable solutions. I like that part.

dakinemaui YES! Exactly! And in the order you placed them. 

Veronica I defined Successful user in my response. Someone who has the hang of YNAB and doesn't fit into any of the groups you mentioned. Users who have gotten ahead and have things under control.

I'm looking for features such as:

1. Fix Stealing From the Future by making overbudgeted globally accounted for in TBB (your entire budget is overbudget, not just the farthest month funds have been budgeted to
2. Income for Next Month as an income category so we can all stop jumping through hoops
3. Built in reimbursement management solution (offset category groups)
4. A true monthly budget template function
5. Monthly funding goal with a max available cap
6. Monthly funding goal calculated on a combination of averages with a cap that equals the monthly  average + sum of monthly overage of the last 12 months
7. Funding goal that takes multiple dates of outflows into account to derive the least needed funding amount to meet all outflows
8. Ability to add a custom round up figure to any calculated goal
    

nolesrule Thanks. I would use 7 all the time. I just sent those (all but one, I'll explain why) to our Product team on your behalf. The one I didn't send was number 4, but only because I'd like more details on it. Is there another thread or a small 1-2 sentence summary I can send to them that might give them more detail to work with?

Veronica #4 (a true template function) is something that does not clash with Rule 3. Once entered, the budget value can be changed without being nagged the rest of the month -- #lifehappens

Veronica There’s a really lengthy conversation about it between me and Todd in about September 2015 (It was before the launch of the credit card function rebuild, which was October). It pre-dates the in app tool, so I don’t have the record of  it (I just checked my email backlog) but it’s probably in the logs somewhere. 

Also it’s in the feature requests pile. I know I’ve submitted it formally at least once, and I don’t think I’m the only one. The basic use case is this: each month, I budget $x for dining out, $y for groceries, and $z for fun money. I will cover all these things with each other so it doesn’t matter what they end up being, so long as together I don’t spend more than $x+y+z. It would be nice if I could set a goal and use quickbudget to budget the initial amount. But since the goal is designed to nag if I don’t budget the minimum, the minute I make the perfectly sound choice to repurpose “dining out” to “groceries” because of quarantine, I get a yellow warning. So there are a handful of categories I must either budget by hand, or ignore their warnings. I do a mix of both in practice but it’d be nice to be able to use quick budget.

Veronica here are a couple more UX items I'd like to see related to Scheduled transactions:

1. The ability to peel off the next recurrence of a transaction without "Enter Now" changing it to today's date. So let's say you have a monthly recurring transaction scheduled for 25 April. I'd like to be able to enter in this occurrence while keeping the 25 April date, and then have the recurring one advance to 25 May. 90% of the time I have to use "Enter Now" and then adjust the date. I rarely use "Enter Now" to actually enter now.
2. The ability to skip the next occurrence in a recurring transaction. Sometimes I just want to skip the next one. Instead I have to "Enter Now" and then delete it.
3. More complex scheduling engine for recurring transactions. While I don't think it needs to get as advanced as accounting for bank holidays (although that would be a nice to have and not quite sure how to make that work globally), I'd like to see more options like "Last day of the month",  Xth <weekday> of Month (e.g.  3rd Wednesday), and an additional option to shift a day to a prior weekday if a date falls on the weekend.

Veronica One more thing about Scheduled transactions... but this one has been bugging me since the YNAB4 days and I just find it hard to believe it hasn't been addressed in all these years

If I set a specific date at the end of the month, I want the recurrence to maintain the specific date even if it pulls forward for a shorter month. For example, I get paid on the last day of the month. So I set it to trigger on January 31st. Then in February, it triggers on February 28th (or 29th this year). In March I would expect it to trigger on the 31st, and in April on the 30th. But the way it works now, every month after February it triggers on the 28th/29th. I am constantly fighting with the scheduler.

And this isn't an issue for my pay check only. I also have Scheduled transactions for my interest bearing accounts, almost all of which post on the last day. I also use these as a reminder to reconcile some of my tracking accounts. The date shift becomes annoying.

I bring this up now, because today is April 29th, and I just had more than a dozen of these pop into my register. Yet tomorrow is the last day of the month.

nolesrule Mine currently do exactly what you described. My last day of the month transactions were dated 1/31, 2/29, 3/31 and April's is sitting for 4/30. I know I read somewhere that this only works if you date the transaction for the 31st. Maybe delete and re-enter come May?

Til Debt Do Us Part I'll experiment with one of them before I do that with all of them, as that would be a lot of extra work for nothing if it doesn't work. It's possible it's because the were migrated transactions.  Migration was not a seamless and flawless process.

nolesrule Mine also work as expected. If the first time I schedule it is during a short month, it will reoccur on the 30th, but if i schedule it in a long month, it will always pull on the actual last day of the month. It's worked that way for a year and a half.

Move Light Sound Life Okay, so it's a good chance mine are due to migrated transactions. Like I said, I'll experiment the next couple months and see what happens.

WordTenor I submitted a budget template feature request in YNAB4 so many years ago that I can't even remember exactly.

nolesrule 

nolesrule said:
More complex scheduling engine for recurring transactions. While I don't think it needs to get as advanced as accounting for bank holidays (although that would be a nice to have and not quite sure how to make that work globally), I'd like to see more options like "Last day of the month",  Xth <weekday> of Month (e.g.  3rd Wednesday), and an additional option to shift a day to a prior weekday if a date falls on the weekend.

 In addition to these, I'd like to see more granular control over timing.  Why can't I set a recurring transaction for every 6 weeks for instance?  Instead of the existing fixed weekly/monthly/annual schedules, it should be every X weeks/months/years where you enter in your desired frequency.

nolesrule I'd also love to see better recurring transaction handling, I'm forever adjusting transactions that fall on a weekend, and the inability to enter future-dated transactions makes it harder than it should be. I have to wait for them to happen on the wrong day, then move them to the right one. 

I agree with a lot of the feedback in this thread, development pace is glacial and most of the updates seem to be trivial tweaks to the UI. Stealing from the future and reimbursement are big issues for me, and please do better with reporting - I can remember this being promised years ago as one of the reasons for the SaaS model, but  years later it is still so basic. 

Regarding making nYNAB easier for newcomers, as a long-time YNAB user (since YNAB3 in 2010) I find a lot of what nYAB tells me is confusing. YNAB4 was so simple and the buffer plus income for <next month> literally changed my financial life, but yNAB is so much harder to understand. Age of money seems to be an arbitrary number, it's in the 90s for me so I ignore it, and I also have never really understood TBB properly (coupled to the SFTF issue). And neither Funds for May nor Total Available make sense either - they don't obviously map to any other number. Credit cards are just weird, I pay in full each month so ignore it, but don't understand these numbers either. Overall I probably don't understand where fully half the headline numbers on the budget screen come from, so i'm not surprised that newcomers don't either.  

My income is substantially higher than my outgoings so can get away with ignoring the details; I budget to somewhere near zero (not exactly zero, as I've lost the buffer from YNAB4 and so it's harder to know what zero is), don't overspend budget categories, and it all kind of works out. But as far as i'm concerned, nYAB took something that worked brilliantly and made it significantly worse. 

Only thing keeping me on nYNAB is that i've not found an alternative yet. I'm parallel-running Banktivity which is ok (and far superior for reporting) but transaction entry is clunky, direct import is broken there too, and I can't understand its budgeting. But I feel like i'm getting very poor value from nYNAB right now, and I can't imagine renewing if I can find a suitable alternative. 

B. 

dakinemaui Sure thing. I sent your list right to our Product team on your behalf. 

Veronica Thank you very much!

Green Tiger so for $1.10 a month you are using a product you think is inferior? 

Green Tiger I tried GoodBudget. It's an overly complex, confusing hot mess that really encourages you to stay paycheck to paycheck due to the way it's designed.