Cash Spending vs Credit Spending
I'm having an issue with Cash Spending and Credit spending showing up properly in YNAB. Even if the purchase is made on my credit card, it will show up as "Cash Spending" in the far right hand pane. This causing issues with reconciliation of my credit card at the end of the month where it will show the difference in Spending vs. Total Activity.
My understanding is that if credit card spending shows up as cash spending, this won't show under the credit card section as "Budgeted Spending", thus I will have a variance. I budget all my credit card spending, so it would strand to reason that Activity should match my spending every month. However, this is not the case solely for the reason that some of my CC transactions are showing as "Cash Spending", which I need some help reconciling.
Thanks.
-
Can I suggest taking the When You Have To Use A Credit Card they will be able to answer all your concerns and show you the tricks in 20 minutes.
-
I will look into that thanks. I was hoping I could get a quick answer to the specific issue I'm having and hoping someone has encountered it before. Main issue is transactions that are credit card transactions are showing up as "Cash Spending" in the right hand pane, which makes me think that's why I am having issues with credit card reconciliations.
Interestingly enough when I drill down into my credit card activity the total spending is correct but the "Budgeted Spending" amount is incorrect.
-
Steel Blue Tape If the Budgeted Spending amount is incorrect, it means there isn't enough money in your categories to cover both the cash spending and credit spending in a category (so there isn't enough Budgeted funds to cover everything). Do you have any Yellow Available balances in your categories (hidden categories, too)? Budgeting more towards those categories should fix the issue.
If that's not the case, let me know and we can take a closer look at things! :)
-
-
Steel Blue Tape I'm having the same issue! Did you figure anything out? It doesn't look like you were given a solution here.
For me, my "Shopping" category shows $970.71 in Cash Spending and $9.47 in Credit Spending. In reality, $757.90 is from Cash and $222.28 is from credit.
Anyone know why random portions of the Credit Spend are reporting as Cash?
-
Sorry I'm just now responding, but to answer your question no I couldn't figure it out. There is something wrong with the application/code logic that mis-classified transactions the were credit to debit card transactions (or cash spending). Thus, these won't flow into the available for payment bucket under the credit card payments category. In short, YNAB has a logic flaw in their software and their Developers need to address it. While this isn't a P1 level problem, it's definitely something I would think needs to be fixed as I know other people are having this issue.
The response I received from Support is a "Canned" response and they aren't trained to answer questions with specificity in terms of troubleshooting. Thus, my workaround was to completely start over. If I have this issue again, I will be requesting a refund or an outage credit because this is very basic functionality that needs to be fixed if YNAB wants to drive customer retention. That's how I feel about it anyway if I was running this business...
-
I totally agree. To be honest it almost actually makes the rest of the experience useless. I use credit cards just as much as my debit card so when it doesn't categorize correctly, and the Credit Card Payments bucket doesn't stay accurate, I have to spend hours figuring out where this went off, and usually just end up doing a fresh start. Which sucks.
I'm reaching out to support too, I'll let you know if I get any answers...
-
Hi Steel Blue Tape & Orchid Nomad ,
I'm jumping in from our bug 🐛 squashing team here at YNAB. It sounds like we may need to dive a little deeper on this one as this is definitely not intended behavior! I just sent you each a request via email. If you’re up for it, please take a look and reply there to give us permission to access your budget. Then once we figure out what's happening with that credit + cash overspending confusion we'll continue our conversation here in the forum.
We will get this figured out!
-Elena
-
Elena This is my issue as well. I'm frustrated.
-
-
Elena, I'm not going to be able to help as I completely started from scratch. Orchid might be able to help though.
-
My husband and I are having a similar problem. We budgeted some savings into other categories and now the money we budgeted is coming up as cash spending in the categories we transferred it to and is greyed out. The category that we budgeted from is reporting the full balance as if we never budgeted that money at all.
-
I don't think the bug was rectified. I won't be renewing my subscription though as it seems product bugs and limitations aren't being addressed. I get "Canned" answers from support that don't fix the problem and only give me responses that I'm already aware of from researching the issue myself. If something as simple as bucketing cash versus credit spending can't be rectified in the code, then this platform isn't for me. The entire value prop of this platform is to save me time doing monthly reconciliations and budgeting, which it currently doesn't on my end so the solution is a waste of time and money for me.
-
Hi Steel Blue Tape !
Can you give me a few more details about what you're seeing in your budget? This thread is a few months old. If you're still running into this issue we want to get it ironed out as soon as possible!
-
Faness Please see the thread I opened. That is the issue.... Credit card spending is showing as Cash spending. I really don't know how to explain it any better than that.
-
Steel Blue Tape I took a look at your conversation history and we never received your permission to take a closer look at your account to figure out what was happening. I've resent the request to take a look. If you can respond to that email granting us permission, we can have our development team investigate.
-
-
following
-
Elena , I think I have this issue too. I've been super diligent about clearing all my categories each month and also I've been paying my credit cards in full for the last year. All of a sudden, I noticed as I was flipping backwards through my budget that my CC categories was showing red and overspent/under budgeted. I thought this was strange because I also make sure all categories are funded at the end of the month and available amount for CC payment is always green. I also never overpay.
I noticed flipping through my budget all the way to the beginning that for certain accounts, the budgeted amount in a category is not sending those funds to the CC category when the money is spent because its recognizing the spend as cash and not CC.
Send me an email and you can access my budget to see an exact example.
-
King I just took a look and I see Wade requested budget access so we can dig in! You can respond to that email and we'll get things figured out! :)
-
-
I have this same issue and it is VERY frustrating. Because we pay off our balance each month in our credit cards I decided to make my credit cards a checking account instead of a credit account so I can see the actual balance. Now my problem is figuring out how to rectify the initial budget.
-
Hi Powder Blue Lion !
We don't suggest this approach but we understand some users prefer it! When you say you need to rectify the initial budget, do you mean your starting balance?
-
Faness I had to make an initial "phantom" transaction because I couldn't figure out how to fix my issue. I think it has to do with starting the CC accounts with a negative balance. I had money saved in various holding accounts and I double checked my numbers but my "budget" was in the negative. I wanted to have an accurate budget so I added the phantom transaction to fix the budget.
-
Powder Blue Lion You fix the budget by fixing the budget. Setting your card as a checking account brings the money in your budget to the net of your accounts. If your budget was negative after making the credit card a checking account, it is a warning that you don’t have enough money to pay your card in full and still do everything else you want to do.
Delete the fake transaction and remove money from your categories until TBB is 0. That is the the real picture of what you can afford to spend until you get more money.
-
-
I have been speaking to YNAB about this. We didn’t really come up w a solution. According to YNAB, somehow I was paying my account in full and then having a positive balance which makes it cash payment. This didn’t really answer my question about why this happens or how it is possible that the cc budget category and the cc account didn’t match up. I moved about $1k from other categories to rectify, reconciled my accounts, and hope for the best. If it happens again I’ll be looking for another budget softwares.
-
Hi Gray Router !
As long as your Available amount now matches your credit card balance, you shouldn't have any trouble going forward as long as your credit card transactions are covered in your budget. That will keep your Available amount in line with your spending so you can always cover the balance.
If you overpay on your credit card, then the amounts will need to be adjusted, but we're more than happy to help if that pops up! :)
-
-
I have discovered that for those who pay their credit cards in full each month it is much simpler to configure your credit card accounts as checking accounts. I struggled for over a year with the way YNAB handles credit cards and was often confused trying to untangle the mix of credit spending and cash spending in the same category. YNAB simply cannot differentiate between the 2 types of spending in the same category except on a monthly basis. There is not enough fidelity in the software to handle this.
-
I'm having this problem as well. When I entered an interest transaction into an "unlinked" credit card account, the interest showed up as "cash spending". When an interest transaction was entered into a "linked" credit card account, it showed up as "credit spending". It appears that YNAB thinks that unlinked credit card accounts are cash accounts.
-
Maroon Foal - Actually, scratch that. I just entered an interest charge into another "unlinked" credit card account, and it showed up as "credit spending". Back to the drawing board!
-
Hi Maroon Foal !
Have you had any luck finding the culprit? Where are you seeing the "cash spending", in the inspector on the right hand side of the budget?
-
Faness - I haven't determined the culprit yet. The "cash spending" shows up in the inspector on the right-hand side of the budget. I tried deleting the unlinked credit card account, and then recreated it, but ran into the same problem. I thought that I might have accidentally created the account as a cash account instead of a credit card account, but that obviously wasn't the case. Something is different about this particular credit card account than the other unlinked credit card accounts, because I can add an interest charge to another unlinked credit card account, and it shows up as "credit spending". The only difference between the two unlinked credit card accounts is that the one that has the problem has an entry for initial account balance, a payment transaction from a linked checking account, and a interest transaction that was manually entered, whereas the other unlinked credit card account has $0 balance and no transactions.
I am willing to give YNAB support access to my budget so that they can help me troubleshoot this problem.
-
Maroon Foal Great! You can enable Support Access for your account and I'd be more than happy to take a closer look. Once you’ve done that, let me know—and mention whether you’d like to continue the discussion here or via email instead. :)
-
Faness - Support access has been enabled. I don't mind continuing the conversation here for the benefit of others, as long as you don't divulge any specifics regarding my budget, such as account balances or other potentially sensitive information.
-
Faness The credit card account that thinks it is a cash account is the State Farm Visa account. One of the unlinked credit card accounts that thinks its a credit card account is the Best Buy Card account. Another weird thing that happened is when I added a $20.62 interest transaction to the State Farm Visa account, all of a sudden I had $20.62 showing up as "To be budgeted". Not sure why.
-
Maroon Foal sounds like your credit card balance is positive. Check in the left hand column.
-
satcook - In the left-hand menu under "Accounts", the credit card in question has a negative number next to it, meaning that I'm carrying a balance on the card from month to month. Is that what you mean by a positive credit card balance?
-
Maroon Foal Thank you for enabling access! Satcook is on the right track here. Your State Farm Visa had a payment applied that's dated before your starting balance. So, in order, your credit card had a positive balance, then the interest charge was applied and covered with the "cash" on your credit card, then your starting balance was listed.
To fix this, you can change the date and balance of your starting balance so that it takes place before that first payment that's listed in the account.
-
Adjusting the date of the starting balance so that it was before any other transactions in the account fixed the problem. Many thanks to Faness and satcook for the assistance! Happy New Year!
-
