
Bank Connections Suck
So, yes, I'm frustrated. I have been spending the better part of a year dealing with the joke that YNAB calls bank connectivity. Today, I'm staring at a screen - again - where YNAB can't connect to my bank.
The replies I get from support are "well that's not the YNAB way, just enter every expense proactively" (paraphrased). Or, if I look at the support page, I see entry after entry showing failures in connecting to different banks.
This isn't widespread, this is YNAB. My Fidelity account works fine when connecting to other accounts, when I used Mint, it worked fine, and when I used Quicken - also perfectly fine.
I'm tired of YNAB's CONSTANT connectivity failures and constant inability to help. This is 2020 - all kinds of online services talk to each other flawlessly. Get this fixed YNAB...
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**UPDATE**
This issue has now been resolved and things are back up and running! We've updated our status page to reflect the latest news. You can fill out this form if you would like our Direct Import Team to take a closer look!
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Another update, and my oversight because it was already on our status page—sorry about that folks. 😅
Many financial institutions are experiencing high volumes/infrastructure issues right now, due to the number of customers checking their accounts for COVID-19 Economic Impact Payments/Stimulus checks.
Even if your bank's site appears to be up and running, these outages & delays may impact their ability to export transaction data to our import partners, as institutions limit the amount of data requests from third-parties (like our partners) in order to prioritize customer traffic to their site.
We'll continue to monitor the situation, and update the Status Page as we hear more! In the meantime, we recommend entering any transactions as they occur, using either the web or mobile app, and also taking advantage of our File-Based Importing & Scheduled Transactions features; once transactions are able to import again, they'll match right up with the ones you've already entered. -
I share your frustration. I've been waiting for 2 days for YNAB to update with the bank. I see transactions that are no longer pending but YNAB says there's nothing to import. If I'm reduced to importing it all manually, it takes away a huge reason for using YNAB to collect this information in the first place. I might as well use Excel at that point.
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I know a large part of my frustration is with the state of all the things in the world lately, but, yeah, I'm getting real sick of the direct import flaws as well. My blood pressure every time I have to "reconnect" or refresh is through the roof lately. And some days, even that doesn't work - like today since apparently everyone is checking to see if their stimulus funds deposited (in the US at least).
I agree that direct importing with other accounts (Personal Capital, Betterment, and my local Credit Union, FFS!) , do not have the same issues as YNAB does.
My issue is with connecting with Capital One, which says is a "known" issue on the Status page (identified back in Sept 2019). What gives YNAB? Is this a lack of coding knowledge, or resources, or what? Don't promote DI as a "feature" if it doesn't work.
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I'm having the same problems. Occasionally I can get it to work and then yet another bank connection fails. Yea I can enter transactions (and I do) but reconciliation of the transactions is becoming a real pain point when other apps have no problem handling the new multi-factor authentication flows these banks are spinning up.
YNAB get your developers to fix these integrations or hire better ones like me. It's challenging, yes, but not impossible to resolve the problem. I chose this app over others because of the ease of use for me and my wife. It's no longer in the easy to use category. 🤨 -
Hey folks! We know that bank importing issues are inconvenient and we do our best to both prevent and quickly fix issues that arise. I know it's frustrating!
If you're having trouble with a connection at the moment, please report a Bank Importing Issue here, and our Importing team will be happy to look closer at your specific connection! They're happy to help get things back up & running.To be completely upfront, data aggregation is imperfect. It's an unfortunate truth, but it's a truth nonetheless. It's expected that there will be bumps in the road, and while we do everything we possibly can to fix them as quickly as possible, it's just not something we have the power to eliminate (and trust me, we really wish we did).
Banks frequently make changes to their security settings, websites, or data files—and these are all things our Direct Import partner needs to manually fix. We do expect the majority of connections to work without issue the majority, but occasional hiccups are expected from time to time.
We are continuously making improvements here but we expect there to be hiccups as banks make changes.
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Alice Blue Orca Lagniappe Vegan Gray Song Melissa Nessa2481 Gold Mill Our Importing team can look into any connection issues you're experiencing. Please report a Bank Importing Issue here, and they'll take it from there!
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For what it's worth, I've learned to go with banks and credit cards that work well with YNAB. Since YNAB struggles to adapt in this area, I've adapted to them. For example, I had a Capitol One credit card and we all know how direct import has been broken for over a year now with them. So, I dumped that credit card. My Chase and Citi cards work great. Every budget account I own now works well with YNAB.
I discovered YNAB over 10 years ago and the method has turned my financial life around so I've decided it's worth it to me to adapt to them to make my life easier in the area of automatic importing. Instead of fighting it, I've succumbed and now life is bliss. 🙂
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I used YNAB for 3 years prior to 2019, but quit before coming back recently. I left because of constant import issues with Discover Card and intermittently Amex. The argument to manually input things doesn't wash because there are multiple users on the card accounts, and I can't compel my significant other or dependents to meticulously enter transactions. So I quit YNAB at the end of 2018, but came back at the start of this year to try again. Amusingly, literally the day before my trial period was up (which was extended, thanks for that!) Amex imports and Discover imports both stopped working.
I had interactions with support on this who told me 2 - 3 day delays was to be expected (delays were actually more typically 4 - 6 days) but I don't see this with Banktivity or Quicken, which both import within 24 hours of the transaction clearing the account. Quicken connect directly (allegedly) but Banktivity uses an aggregator (does does Personal Capital and MINT, neither of which gave be these issues when I tried them out).
To be fair, what Nicole said about banks prioritizing direct logins is true, and we're not living in normal times with the pandemic. Quicken announced disruptions too (due to COVID-19 and high internet-banking use) and I'm seeing the same behavior across other apps. However it's also true that when institutions have had issues before, or changed something, YNAB's connection always seems to be the first to go down and the last to be restored, with the feedback from support being this isn't a priority and we should not rely on it. You certainly don't get that feedback from other companies offering paid financial software support.
Discover does allow you to export QFX so it's easy to go in periodically and import (although honestly part of the reason we pay a fee is to not have to do this) but other banks don't offer it. Amex, US Bank, Chase etc.
I love YNAB's approach to budgeting, it's the very best out there. But there's already quite a lot of work to maintain accounts, and the import issue makes this worse. For example, you can't reconcile to a historic date and balance, which is kind of strange to be honest. So you must reconcile on the day you have a known balance, and of course all items must be cleared on both sides. If it takes 5 days to update an account, reconciliation without manual input is almost impossible.
My hope is that YNAB will switch aggregators whenever their current contract runs out, and that this is sooner rather than later.
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One thought I had on all this is that YNAB can see when bank connections don't work. They can also probably see any specific error messages, how often these occur, and how many people it affects.
Being in IT, I have to ask... what monitoring & alerting is being done? When core parts of the platform like this regularly fail, are these issues being worked on directly with back office partners? I'd think users should not have to report issues after its been clear that they are pervasive - especially after already reporting them so many times as some of us have.
Then again, perhaps they are doing this and that's why there's seemingly a new import partner periodically? I wonder what is being done to make sure QA is there before going live?
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This time you really can't blame YNAB. https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/g1s8rd/is_every_major_banks_website_down/
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If that's the reason, I find it odd that both my Bank account and my AMEX stopped importing at the same time. I haven't received any posted transactions since Monday for either of them. And both were working okay prior to that. No error messages, just not getting any transactions. I doubt AMEX receives a lot of stimulus deposits.
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So, like everyone here, I'm also not able to sync up with my bank (PNC). As a software engineer, it is really difficult to look at the fragility of the API between YNAB and the various banking institutions. I realize most of this is probably on the banks' sides.
My issue is that in trying to re-link my PNC accounts (I had removed the link initially not realizing it was a widespread issue), I cannot type in the user/pass fields of the Link Accounts dialog. It's weird, as if it is blocked somehow by YNAB, yet it does not appear greyed out or inactive.
I have noticed from time to time that the front-end controls with YNAB seem to get funky. I assume this is an Angular (or whatever FE language/framework YNAB uses) hiccup, and normally, closing the tab and bringing up a new YNAB tab does the trick. Otherwise, closing chrome and starting again will do the trick if necessary. Not this time. I have shutdown chrome, and upon restarting chrome, choose a new tab but I still cannot type my user/pass creds into the Link Account dialog.
Is this somehow being managed/blocked by YNAB, or is this a bug?
Thanks,
Jerry
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Hi All - an update from OP (me): I was switched to Plaid and things started to immediately improve. Two things I noticed right away were that Chase started working flawlessly, *and* I wake up to a mobile app notification silently delivered at 5:30 am saying "X transactions have been imported and are ready to review". (Never had that with other providers).
Note that I am not saying things are perfect: It's only been a few days since I was switched, and Capital One still doesn't work, but this goes to show that it is not necessarily related to "increased demand" at the banks for stimulus money. Some issues could be related but mine were not.
I hope this proactive overnight update and functionality will continue - and that the remaining banks will be fixed. I do understand differences in banks and connectivity requirements (not to mention the handling of multifactor auth, "new location" challenge/response, etc.
One thought is: Obey the 80/20 rule. Don't spend 80% of effort chasing 20% of use cases. Just get the top 10-20 banks by user count working flawlessly and keep them working (yes, in conjunction with Plaid and others), and then knock out the rest one by one. But for sure the big players - Chase, BofA, Citi, Capital One, etc. these should always be the focus for consistent uptime.
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I'd love to point the finger at the stimulus act here but this is the 3rd extended outage I've had between YNAB and PNC going back about 9 months. The first one eventually resolved itself after a week or so. I was able finally reconnect the second time by removing the connection and relinking everything. So far nothing has worked this time. This seems to be a weak link in YNAB's service. If the issue is with data-integrators it may be time to move to a new one. Ok, my rant is over, I feel slightly better.
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I agree that YNAB is just not good enough at bank imports and it's causing me to seriously reconsider my subscription. I haven't been able to sync my credit card for Capital One for a whole week now, even though I can easily log into the Capital One website with the same creds. I've had the same issue repeatedly with my bank (USAA). I do not feel like entering every transaction manually and neither does my wife. I do not believe it should be that hard for you to consistently get it right. Get it together, please!
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Yup. And this is clearly a Bank Import Parter issue, and I was switch to Plaid a few weeks ago in their beta phase. I have connection to 3 *very* different Bank (Desjardins Crédit Union, Tangerine and Canadian Tire bank).
- Connection in YNAB is shown as healthy, but nothing is imported
- I am able to connect flawlessly to those 3 banks directly without any problem.
It has been like that the whole week so far, and there is no doubts the problem is with the import partner.
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Gray Mare said:
Go with the flow, if you like the ynab current.Ha ha! Love it!