Voracious Reader To add on to #2: if you use the phone app and have location services turned on, YNAB will remember the payee from last time you entered a transaction at the same location, which makes it really quick to enter.

mamster That IS pretty cool. I usually keep location off on my phone but that's actually a decent reason to consider turning it back on.

mamster That's a pretty cool feature, but it's also very annoying when you want to explicitly leave an empty Payee, but app keeps trying to auto-fill the field for you based on your location. The most annoying thing is that, once filled, it's not possible to delete the payee info, so the only choice is creating some fakish "No" payee.

jesjimher I see your point, but I've never used an empty payee and honestly didn't realize until this thread that it was possible!

mamster I leave empty payees all the time, when I'm inputting purchases in places I'm certain I won't come again, like a soda in a random bar, or a parking fee while on holidays. What do you input as payee in those cases? Filling a payee every single time must end up with a huge list of payees, isn't that the case?

jesjimher for parking I just use Parking as the payee (it comes out of the same category that I use for rideshares). I haven’t encountered any issues since 2014 in having a long list of payees. 

jesjimher Like jenmas , I sometimes do general payees, like ORD for anything purchased at O'Hare. I currently have 496 payees, and it doesn't seem to cause any problems.

jesjimher 

jesjimher said:
Filling a payee every single time must end up with a huge list of payees, isn't that the case?

 Why would that be a problem?

I get that it might not add any useful information (and I do use a few generic payees for parking, etc) but I can't think why it would be a problem.

jenmas My line of thinking is that a generic payee is pretty much the definition of a category :-) So why should I fill a Parking payee when I can enter directly the parking category? Having both seems redundant and unnecessary.

But you're right in that having a lot of payees isn't actually harmful, so I suppose it's just a matter of personal choice.

jesjimher yes, but if I am using the mobile app and adding the transaction from the budget page, and type Parking as the payee, the app automatically fills in the category and account for me (I use a specific credit card for parking because it codes as travel and gets 3% cash back on one of my cards).

jesjimher 

I am feeling pretty unimaginative and silly now because I have always used the actual payee name even for one-off expenses just because that's how I always did it in my checkbook. I really like the idea of grouping all my, for example, fast food purchases together, but I also like being able to see at a glance where I've paid and eaten that month.

But no, I don't have an unmanageable payee list, I just go to manage payees and hide them. 

For me I think the optimal play starting now is:

1. Fill in transaction, including correct payee.

2. After the month rolls over, go to "Combine and Rename Payees" and recategorize Taco Bell, etc into Fast Food, and one time expenses into a category like Parking, and then for one-time parking expenses going forward, just use Parking.

Maurycy Zarzycki Well, when reconciling, it makes it much easier to compare you bank's list of transactions with your account register. What if you have several transactions for the same amount all within a few days of each other?

Maybe people who never had to keep an actual paper checkbook register are less attached to this info?

Maurycy Zarzycki By description do you mean the "memo" field? I generally don't use it. I might use it to record when I buy toilet paper or shampoo or toothpaste or something I'm trying to pin down how often I need to buy it on average, if that makes sense.

Maurycy Zarzycki I use the memo for a few things. In the vast majority of my transactions it is blank. If they payee is the name of my mortgage company and the category is mortgage, that's all I need to know. I use it a lot when I'm buying presents to identify what I bought for whom (I have 2 gift categories: Christmas and Birthday&Other). I have a single vacation category so I'll use the memo field to let me know what trip I was spending on (deposit for May trip due in November, that kind of thing). The use of a split transaction doesn't make me more or less likely to use the memo field.

Maurycy Zarzycki Well I use it to note where I spent the money - a blank payee field and "Home Maintenance" category does nothing for me.   I'm a data person so I like to know how much of each category was spent where.  It may lead me to change some behaviors.  

Maurycy Zarzycki I definitely split categories for household/groceries/pet/home maintenance. I use the memo on the splits to say what items I got (or groups of items). I don't use the memo for the whole transaction in these cases. 

I used to use a spreadsheet for grocery/household items that included date, price, item, brand, size, and a larger category so that I could see what I needed to focus on getting in bulk or cheaper or on sale,  etc.

While I never want to do that in YNAB, I'm considering trying something like that again at some point in the future.

Maurycy Zarzycki Yeah, I can't see getting as granular as even that (even though Polish is not nearly as close to Russian as I had imagined, I can still see repeated categories within one transaction). I can't see ever having more than one line item for each category in a split transaction, unless you're buying something for someone else and you want to keep track of the amount, maybe.

 I get pretty darned granular. Non-essential groceries are things that are just wants, like soda and cookies, and not basic things I would still buy if I lost my job, like basic produce and meat. Home supplies are things like tin foil and dishwasher tabs, etc. The chicken thighs I bought to make cat food, I separated out from my essential groceries because they're pet supplies. Plus I was out of grocery money for the month, or I might have just let it ride because if push came to shove I could feed that to us instead of the cats.

It's all about what information it provides that is useful to the person recording the transaction. I want to know how much I need to expect to spend on groceries if I lose my job, so I have to get that granular.

Maurycy Zarzycki Ah, I get it! And you went through and recategorized them all as "Jedzenie" (oh, like "еда", I see it now!) instead of collapsing them down into only 7 splits?

Edit to add: now that I've played in Google Translate and had it read these words to me, I realize it's not that different; I'm just illiterate! 😄

Maurycy Zarzycki I think there are two things going on here. A communication issue and a generational issue. All account registers always include a payee/payor. Let me ask you the opposite question, why wouldn't you want to know who the payee/payor is?

Maurycy Zarzycki Ah, so I think we're finally getting down to what you're really asking. No, it's not really related to budgeting but it is standard to account registers. Your YNAB account registers should match your online account registers so you shouldn't have to refer back to your bank application. As for the description, you don't have to put anything there unless you need further clarification. The shop name is better suited to the payee field than the memo field.

Maurycy Zarzycki 

Maurycy Zarzycki said:
I put the shop name in the memo/description field since I don't have a better idea what to put there.

 The more usual place to put it would be the payee field. If you're going to record it, it makes sense to put it in the column designed for that information. 

I think I use it out of habit (accountant) but also because it eases reconciliation and lets me splice and sort data in different ways. I usually am fairly specific with my payees on bank accounts but may be more generic on things like veg stall, farmers market, coffee stall etc that are generally paid for with cash.

I have found the Toolkit spending by payee report useful. Similarly, drilling down into my food categories and realising a particular coffeeshop is my downfall or I'm overspending at farmer's markets etc is really helpful.  Yes, you can note the payee down in the memo column but that acts as a catch all for any other information people want to record so it can get a bit lost.

As an example I often leave the memo column blank but will sometimes record, for example, what item of clothing I bought, why I had to eat out, which trip I was on etc. Other people record check numbers there but I'm in the UK so I can't remember the last check I wrote.

Maurycy Zarzycki If you don’t need the payee to distinguish different kinds of payments within one category, you probably have too granular of categories. For example: I have “Dining out.” Even though I use relatively generic payees, I still might want to know if my Bar spending is going up or down relative to my Restaurant spending. So the Restaurant and Bar payees are important. 

 Upon further reflection with Google Translate:  you do have individual splits for individual items. Unless there is some material difference for you between prawns and carrots,  for instance, you get reimbursed for prawns but not for carrots,  these should both just be “food.” 

This is probably why payees are confusing you. Carrots and prawns likely have the same payee. 

Maurycy Zarzycki Yes, after dragging back through every transaction since. Reconciling usually takes me two clicks - 'is your balance this?' 'Yes'.

What's wrong with seeing it easily ahead of time and correcting it before it happens?

To be honest, I really can't understand what's wrong with seeing who you gave your money to.

The recurrence of <my work>Canteen on my transaction list has got me back into the habit of making my own lunches after a lapse, because I hate giving those bar stewards money (and the food isn't even healthy, it's all crisps and chocolate...)

Maurycy Zarzycki We are having a translation error. 'I really can't understand what's wrong with...' is a roundabout English way of saying 'the obvious and full benefit of doing this is....'

So I'm telling you that the benefit is you see who you have given your money to.

Currently I give too much back to work in the canteen and I know this for a fact because the words 'Work: canteen' keep appearing in my payee list under the category 'Eating out'. Well, it's one thing to spend my hard earned cash on a steak dinner in a nice restaurant but it's quite another to give it back to my employer in return for a crappy chicken wrap.

That's the benefit.

As for cheating on reconciliation, you are supposed to check your bank account. I look at my bank on my phone and my YNAB on my computer and they match, so I click. When I miss a payment out or something slips through (usually duplication due to a combination of manual entry of every transaction plus some automation of standing orders) it can be very boring indeed finding it. Having Payee, as well as amount, and category, to look at speeds that up somewhat.

Two benefits.