This is exactly what I did and it worked very well. Having last year's historical transactions in a separate budget meant I could reference them when I needed to (like figuring out my average spending in each category) but they wouldn't get in the way of my forward-thinking budgeting.

Gray Admiral 

Interesting.  Do you use the bank sync?  If yes, did you experience  any issues with linking the same bank accounts to two different budgets?

 I think I imported the last year's transactions in the new budget as a file upload, but I don't see why syncing to two separate budgets would be an issue. The budgets are kept entirely separate so your activity on one doesn't affect another.

Gray Admiral can you give details

exaclty how you did this? I made a separate budget, changed the start date, but it still didn’t import any transactions before June. I’m not sure how to get files to import from my bank website either. Thanks so much!!

Forest Green Memory  Sorry I can't be more specific because every bank is different, but if you have online banking then you will almost certainly be able to download files from their website. There will probably be an area called View All Transactions or something like that where you can pick a date range and see all the activity on an account within that span of time. You will likely also be able to download the transactions as a spreadsheet or another file type instead of viewing them in your browser. If you're not sure where, reach out to your bank's customer service email address and they should be able to help you find it.

Once you have the files downloaded from your bank, you can import them into YNAB using the upload feature.

Hi Forest Green Memory !

The Direct Import feature can only pull transactions back to a certain point (usually the cut off is 6 weeks), which explains why you couldn't see transactions from before June. Gray Admiral is correct that how banks offer those transaction downloads differs. Do you mind sharing which bank you use? If it's a more common bank someone here may be familiar with the process! :)

Faness So you show how to "change the date".  Fine.  But that doesn't seem to have any effect on anything, other than changing that date.  My expectation was that when I changed the date the software would go pull transactions starting on that date.  It appears that's not what happens.  I just changed the date of my checking account starting balance to be the first of the month, which has no effect, as far as I can see.  Could you please explain how changing the date accomplishes the goal of importing past transactions?

Duncan Is this a brand new account? You'll want to adjust the date and the amount of the starting balance. Try unlinking and re-linking the account to pull in the transactions, if you don't see them pop up.

Direct Import will only provide historical transactions from 15 days in the past, so if you need more history, using File-Based Importing is the way to go!

I think you're new to YNAB, but one thing that could impact this is if you've reconciled—then it looks back three days. If that's the case here, you'll want to create a new account and make those starting balance adjustments.

Khaki Octopus As you'll see here, and elsewhere in the forum if you search for others that have similar questions, the general advice is to start where you are now and go forward, not back -- it's going to be time consuming to enter and budget for 6+ months of past data, and there's a high likelihood of errors or issues with that much data to add. Budgeting tends to work best when you work forward, since you can't change your past spending.

I can see the need for tax records, though, so you may consider keeping a separate budget just for the past six months where you can import all your transactions, but not necessarily go through the hassle of "budgeting" for all that spending. This way, you get the tax records you need with all your transactions recorded, but will do budgeting in a separate budget with reduced chance of issues. 

Direct import can import past transactions if you change the starting balance date, but I'm not sure it's going to be able to import 6+ months worth of data. You'll probably want to import those transactions using an export file from your bank:

https://docs.youneedabudget.com/article/173-file-based-import

Khaki Octopus 

Khaki Octopus said:
Yes, this is an issue for me as well. I need to track from the beginning of the year so I can get totals of categories for tax deductions at the end of the year.

 You mean "want", not "need". How did you get this information in previous years? It's unlikely that option is no longer available to you. It's only the one year you'd have to reference two different sources for the data. That's hardly a major undertaking.

nolesrule Hmm, I would like to know how to import older transactions as well, and came here for a solution, not an opinion or judgement. They also asked for a solution, not for an opinion about what they “want.” If they “want” to do it, more power to them for “wanting” to do it with YNAB.

Forest Green Memory You'll find that very often the answer to "how do I" is "Don't; doing so won't serve you.." YNAB isn't like every other piece of budgeting software, and the best results with YNAB come from using it as intended, which means not doing things like backdating transactions. Rather than tell new users how to do something how to do something that we know will make their budgeting more difficult, many of us choose to go, "Don't do that thing." 

Honestly, it's not very difficult to begin the budget with backdated transactions. But if you have to ask how to do it, you probably aren't someone who should do it, because the results of it will be very confusing to account for in YNAB. If you're the kind of person who will easily figure out how to account for the results in YNAB, you can probably figure out how to get the backdated transactions. 

WordTenor 

This made me guffaw coffee through my nose this morning.  Unfortunately for me, I knew just enough computer stuff to make me a menace to myself and my budget. 🙄  Luckily for me, I did this while using YNAB4, and YNAB4 has a built in fail safe for gung-ho newbie enthusiasts like me (or like I was when I first started). I was able to simply reload my budget from the point in time before I began the download (or is that upload?), and then whistle nonchalantly like I had never tried to do anything silly.  🙂  The web version has no such fail safe, which is why I suggested doing this in a second trial budget, one that can be deleted if/when everything goes so much more wrong than a person anticipates. 

Purple Mainframe The only thing that matters is your income constraint. You allocate funds to the important categories first, and things get what they get. Past spending really is not terribly useful.

Additionally, how do you define "too much"? All that means is higher priority things do not receive their desired funding. Since you are already allocating them first moving forward, the past spending is still largely useless.

The only thing historic spending will suggest is an estimate of spending, but you hardly need to categorized a years worth of transactions to form an estimate.

Finally, that estimate will immediately be lowered in many cases, further obviating the need for meticulous characterization. 

Your call, obviously, but most people would disagree with your "only way" comment. If you insist, however, File Based Import will achieve what you desire.

Purple Mainframe As dakinemaui mentioned, you can certainly use File-Based Importing to bring in past transactions, but we don't recommend it.

YNAB is designed around the YNAB Method, which can be a shift in thinking. The Method encourages prioritizing money you have on hand right now and, by doing so, awareness of spending decisions becomes clear quickly.  What would it be like if you considered YNAB a "clean slate" and used your budget to get laser-focused on your current priorities?

Sea Green Mare I checked with our developers and you should be able to import way more than the past five years of data. In fact, you can import over twenty years of data if you wished to! ...Not that we recommend that! 😉  Bringing in a ton of old data is certain to slow a budget down and create a lot of work for yourself.

Are you having issues in the app using file-based importing? If you are and bringing in this information is important to you, I suggest importing in batches, perhaps a year at a time.

And, if you *do* choose to bring this data in, please be sure to reconcile to the present date. That will enable your budget to perform more quickly.

Sea Green Mare Ah ha! You're right—the public API does have more restrictive limits. Give it a try on the web client and it should work for you!