Suggestion - Drag and Drop Transaction order for easy Reconciliation
Reconciling can sometimes be a a pain because the order of my transactions on my statement is different to the order in YNAB. When I have multiple transactions that are the same amount then it becomes even more difficult to cross reference them. This could be easily solved if I could drag and drop the transactions to match the order of my bank statement.
I would welcome any other tips. And yes, I do it everyday and I enter transactions manually. Even then I waste time. At the moment it has become difficult because I had about 10 uncleared transactions over the weekend, and some were the same price. And the dates are different on my bank statement to what I entered at the time of purchase.
Any help on offer? Thanks
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Hi Pink Unicorn !
I run into this issue, too! I bank with Chase and transactions import with the Cleared date rather than the date they took place - so, usually, all of my weekend transactions are dated for Monday and out of order.
The Selected Total feature helps me keep track of things. I select each transaction as I go - I follow the order on Chase's website, which means clicking on them out of order in YNAB, but it lets me track the total as I go.
You can also edit the dates of the transactions to match your bank and use the Filter options to help pinpoint dates ( I find it easier to work with a smaller view of transactions).
Lastly, my colleague Jen (who has been using YNAB for 9 years now) shared her budgeting workflow in this Five Minute Fix blog post.
Give those options a try and let us know what you think! :)
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Faness I achieve this by simply clearing them in YNAb in the order they appear on my bank statement. So the cleared total in YNAB matches the running balance of the bank statement. By the time you get to purchases that have not cleared yet they are only the last day or two and are easy to match up without clearing them if you prefer not to do that yet.
Also having the running balance displayed (maybe a toolkit feature) helps to easily match up balances at the end of any given day
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Once you've found a transaction, just clear it. You hardly need to move it as well. It's not like you're going to clear it again, right?
Best tip: sort by outflow amount. Pick the right one based on payee for identical amounts (which are conveniently grouped). Makes reconciling very quick.
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Thanks for the response. Yes, I can do it that way, but I have lots of transactions that are the same amount. For example, I get lots of $1 coffees at my 7 eleven. I eat lots of $8 subways. Because the dates d not match up, I cannot remember if I have already marked off the transaction or not. I enter everything manually, so then I have to work out which transactions I may have forgotten. At the moment it is very much guess and check.
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Pink Unicorn If the amount and payee are the same, seems like clearing any of them will do.
I cannot remember if I have already marked off the transaction or not
Well, the green (C) would be your first hint that you already marked it off. 😉
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dakinemaui every time I go to reconcile I have two tasks that I have to do at the same time. I have to add transactions that I forgot to add at the time, and I have to reconcile those transactions. When I know the data is incomplete because my ynab balance doesn't match my bank balance, I have to go through this guess and check method to find out which transactions are missing. I can't just clear the transaction, because they are still pending in my account. I also don't know if I am clearing the right transaction, if I have 4 or 5 $1 transactions, and the dates aren't matching up, I have no way of working it out (except guess and check)
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Pink Unicorn The "two things" you mention are what everyone has to do, I'm quite familiar with it. Sorting by amount will also sort by date within the amount. As you go down the bank's list, say, older transactions first, you look for the oldest $1 transaction in YNAB that was manually entered. You already know that bank doesn't use the transaction date, but rather the posting date, right? (The YNAB transaction is therefore earlier than that.) So if the earliest YNAB transaction you found is 2 days earlier or less -- then clear it and move on. If you don't find one in that 2-day sub-window (or whatever delay that card has), then enter one, clear it, and move on.
I also don't know if I am clearing the right transaction
My point was, it doesn't matter if it's the "right" transaction, because it was for the same amount and payee. That makes it "right enough", because a dollar cleared is a dollar cleared.
I suppose it's possible that you may enter an extra $1 and clear it during this process, but so what? -- the cleared balances still match. When you're done reconciling, hide those locked transactions and switch back to date-only sorting, you'll see the original orphan $1 transaction that you somehow missed (and entered a new one instead) with a significantly earlier date sitting there uncleared. Simply delete the bugger.
I'm not sure what pending transactions have to do with anything. They should be ignored.
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dakinemaui thanks for the tips. I'll play around with it. It is unnecessarily difficult though. I'm getting it done. But I do not intend to spend as much time as I currently do fluffing around in YNAB forever.
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dakinemaui pending transactions are money that is uncleared. That is very important. If I ignore those I don't have my real available balance.
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Pink Unicorn When reconciling, the primary consideration is the bank's list of transactions. When I said, "ignore pending transactions", I meant on the bank's list. No doubt the uncleared transactions in YNAB affect your working balance, but we were discussing how to optimize the flow of reconciliation. Good luck with everything!
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Respecting order based on entry time (of day) AND drag and drop should just be a part of the application. IMO
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a_different_joel I'm not trying to start an argument, but why would you spend the effort to drag things around in order just to match the statement? If you found it in order to drag it, then just clear it and be done with it.
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dakinemaui no worries, I understand. While the thread is about reconciling, I didn't really specify that. I just think it should be a part of the applications because it doesn't make any sense otherwise. Why would you want to see your transactions in YNAB any different than you made them? Or that your CC shows you them? It doesn't make any sense. Why would you want YNAB to order things different than they happened? Don't you think they should just show up how you entered them?
Also, I guess you could say the same reason people spend the effort to run YNAB4 and nYNAB at the same time.
I like to see things match up and be right. I like them to be in order. Why shouldn't it be a part of the application? It's almost built in to the frameworks that nYNAB uses. It seems like they go to a lot of effort to exclude things.
I care about pending transactions. Sometimes I miss entering transactions. It's nice to just open a CC website and compare values by order. If it doesn't match, I missed something. Then I enter it. I'm human. I make mistakes.
(disclaimer... not a nYNAB user, still on 4. This is one of the things I thought they would fix.).
I recognize that 'just wanting them to match' and 'matching what happened in real life' isn't a concern to the numbers or some people. But... it just seem like the right thing to do regardless...?
Edited: because I suck at spelling and grammar :) I have tons of respect for you from the old forum. So don't take anything badly. I'm just trying to say... I like things in order... it's not a hard ask. :)
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I'm a bookkeeper so I do a lot of reconciliation using various software. I've never come across a system that has the sort of drag and drop functionality you're discussing, but I do understand wanting to be able to resort the order when there are multiple, confusing entries to check. In that case, I usually put something at the beginning of the memo like a date and/or a sequential number, then sort on the memo.
I realise this isn't what you ultimately want, but maybe it might help as a workaround?
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I would also like to be able to move transactions around, or at least have them stay in the order in which I entered them - which is sometimes not how they seem to wind up. It seems as though when you sort by date, YNAB does a secondary sort by payee name or something. A transaction time field might be helpful here.
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Olive Branch YNAB and every other financial program with an account register I've ever used secondarily sorts by outflow amount to match what is done at the bank for same-day outflows. Smallest to largest to minimize the number of overdrafts.
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dakinemaui Ah...OK, that makes sense.
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Olive Branch
Olive Branch said:
It seems as though when you sort by date, YNAB does a secondary sort by payee name or something.YNAB does a secondary sort by amount, from smallest (or most negative) to largest (or most positive). Financial institutions may match this order (least common), sort in the opposite order (most common), or by time stamp of transactions (rare, but most likely to match user data entry). This typically matches the order the financial institution posts the transactions. The financial institution will typically explain that they clear the largest transactions first because those are the most important to the customer and the one the customer most wants to succeed; the actual reason is that doing it from largest to smallest maximizes the number of overdraft fees if it comes to that.
The annoying thing about the YNAB sort order is that there is no user choice involved. There is no way to force it to stay in the order entered, or to add a secondary sort field to put things in the desired order. So whenever it doesn't match the order the financial institution uses, the user has to hunt through the list to find the correct transaction. This can range from very annoying, for accounts with many transactions in a short time period, to no big deal, for accounts with few transactions and perhaps no more than one on any given day.
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I also think this should be a feature
I am currently looking at some transactions that all happened on the same day and brought an account balance back to 0, then the balance went back up again, but based on the order they are in in YNAB I cannot see that the account balance was actually ever 0, and I do actually need to know that it was-
Green Boat You actually do need to know this because...?
Won't the financial institution tell you this? It's the system of record anyway.
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I have logged the following with the Design Team:
Due to the default ordering of transactions, YNAB shows that my cheque account goes into overdraft when it in fact doesn't, as I have transferred funds in on the same day to cover the expense. I love YNAB more than any other budgeting tools because the psychological/habit aspects of money management are built into the way the application works. Because of YNAB I have conquered my overdraft (thank you!). So being able to look at my cheque account in the register and not see any red balances is a matter of pride for me and a big motivation to keep it that way. But because YNAB sorts by biggest outflow to biggest inflow it shows overdrafts when there are not any. So there are two suggestions to solve this. 1] Have a settings option to sort by either biggest outflow to biggest inflow OR biggest inflow to biggest outflow 2] Allow for drag an drop manual sorting on each day. Pretty please.
