Venmo Linking
What's the plan for supporting linking Venmo accounts? Just switched from Quicken and had that functionality. For people who make money through Venmo this really seems like a necessary feature.
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Hi Slate Blue Flute !
We don't currently support Venmo, but we're finding that Venmo, PayPal and other similar accounts are actually much easier to manage without Direct Import. When you attempt to add a connection to a financial institution that isn't available, it sends the information to our import partner so that they know YNABers would like to see that option in the future. In the meantime, here are a couple of ways to make handling that Venmo account easier!
Option One
Do you keep a balance in your Venmo account? If not, I would recommend keeping Venmo out of your budget altogether.
In most cases, Venmo is acting as a payment processor, and the money is flowing from your bank account to the vendor you're paying, with Venmo being essentially a passthrough between them. The simplest way is to record purchases that you make via Venmo as regular, categorized outflows from your checking account.
Option Two
If you keep a balance in Venmo and decide you do want to keep your Venmo account in your budget, you can set that up as a checking account type and then manually enter only the transactions that affect the Venmo balance—inflows and spending from the actual balance. You'd continue to enter any transactions that affected only the checking account into the checking account and not the Venmo account.
I hope that helps! Let us know if you have any other questions!
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Faness I coincidentally set up my Venmo account in YNAB as you've outlined in Option 2. Venmo allowed me to export 3 months of transactions at a time to a .CSV file which I then did some minor reformatting of to import into YNAB.
It's not ideal but it's a small price to pay to have access to the rest of YNABs superior features. The budgeting features in YNAb are particularly more robust and useful to me than Quicken's. I was a long time YNAB user who left to try other options for a few years but I'm happy to be back and see all the great improvements that happened in my absence.
Thanks for the reply
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Faness , I don't agree with your argument that a "payment service" should not be kept track of in YNAB. A credit card is also a payment service.
I use Venmo to buy things all the time. Losing import functionality greatly cripples YNAB as a whole - I either change my spending habits or stop using YNAB.
If I were on the free trial month right now, I would not subscribe to YNAB based just on this.
Please prioritize making a CSV importer that does not require me to reformat Venmo's output so we can at least manage while we wait (perhaps forever) for Plaid to reinstate transaction importing from Venmo.
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Hi Cornelius Gemstone !
Sorry for the trouble here! I didn't mean to say all payment services should be kept out of YNAB, just that if your Venmo (or PayPal) accounts are kept empty, they're easy to bypass. Since the funds come out of your Checking or other account, and only pass through Venmo, it's easy to enter them directly in that account rather than a separate Venmo account.
Importing CSV files is our last resort option because there isn't an industry standard format and they need to be formatted just right but we can help you with that.
Have you had the chance to try the CSV converter created by a fellow YNABer? It may help convert your CSV file from your bank into a compatible format. There's also an article that covers Importing a CSV file that will show you how to format the file.
Let me know if you have any questions about that!
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Faness , importing CSV files *is* the last resort because you no longer have support from importing from Venmo directly.
The CSV converter you linked to doesn't work (it won't format dates correctly), nor am I really interested in uploading my transactions to some completely uncontrolled environment.
I would like YNAB to get a bit more active on this issue; removing functionality is the worst thing you can do to your customer (you never know who's using it).
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Cornelius Gemstone While we do request for financial institutions to be added (or re-added), we don't have control over the resources our import partners are able to utilize. We can't say for certain rather Venmo will be supported in the future, but you can reach out to our Direct Import Team to request updates on this issue.
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This really is an oversight that needs to be addressed! Please add support for Venmo!
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new to ynab... looks great but lacking venmo is a big issue for me. mint's reputation is inferior, but that's where I started, and where I may go back to, since mint supports using venmo.
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Forest Green Tugboat If you just need a glorified check register that stays up to date, that’s what you should do.
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Superbone As my father was fond of saying, don't cut off your nose to spite your face :)
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Please add venmo back
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Venmo adds a difficult complication for me and YNAB. My spouse sends and receives small amounts through venmo constantly; and the nature of venmo is that it will draw from its own balance before debiting a bank account. This causes partial withdrawals or lump sum deposits into our bank account that make it difficult to track spending by category because our bank account is contextless. We don't want to treat venmo as a general ledger or opaque service because we lose reconciliation.
With the popularity of venmo I think direct support of a venmo is not a 'nice to have' but a required feature.
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as i've gotten more used to using YNAB I actually realize that having venmo is an unnecessary component. I'm now quickly just transferring my venmo balance to my main bank account. there was a really helpful article from YNAB about having multiple accounts and how it's frivolous. took me awhile but now I'm on board with it--I really only need 1 account for my personal finances.
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Forest Green Tugboat Any chance you saved/bookmarked that article? I'm interested in reading it.
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Ivory Dragon https://www.youneedabudget.com/trust-your-budget-and-close-some-accounts/
this helped. I've been using ynab for a month and it has seriously changed the way I think about and interact with my cash. its been major. it took me HOURS to figure out, but it was 100% worth the headache.
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Forest Green Tugboat
Thanks for the response. I'll check that link out. It took me hours to set up, too, but it has been worth the effort. I still feel like I would like to have Venmo linked, but I like the simplicity of having the fewest accounts to deal with.
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Its not always practical or even possible to transfer every individual deposit that hits venmo with an active account. And while this approach may work for some I feel it is an extra layer of management that should be unnecessary considering we have software to relieve us clerical tedium. All of YNAB's practices can be done without software, we use the software to make it easier. I appreciate the work-around but for me I'd like to see a more proper solution.
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Forest Green Tugboat Agreed. I don't have Venmo or PayPal in my budget. (Well, technically I have PayPal crypto in my budget but that's different.)
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really need this feature, many like me keep large balances in venmo because payments made to you sit in your venmo account balance rather than going straight to your bank...so it really is a separate account and not just a money transfer service
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My venmo tracking crapped out a month ago and I'm actively looking for YNAB alternatives because of that
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Orange Drill Adam Weitzman Khaki Panther Sky Blue Keyboard
Though Plaid recently stopped supporting Venmo for the time being, we could try switching you to our other import partner, Mx, who recently began supporting Venmo again. Just let us know in Support if you'd like to give it a try! You can reach out to our team by reporting a Bank Importing Issue. -
Dela I notice you said "for the time being." Can you confirm that it's actually on Plaid's roadmap to fix this? If not, is there a way for me to determine what financial services are supported by Mx? I'd consider switching if I knew it supported everything I use.
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Alexander Thompson Plaid does hope to support Venmo in the future, but we're currently unable to provide a timeline of whether-or-when support for this institution will be restored.
In general, the best way to determine if Mx supports all of your current connections and you're a good fit for switching is to get in touch with support. You can reach out to our team right from your budget. :)
I did check your personal connections, and you *are* a good fit. I sent you an email to start the conversation about switching to Mx if you'd like.
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I also just found out my Venmo import no longer works. This is a must have for many of us. I have a lot of Venmo transactions, certainly more than I have checking transactions. Much rather have my checking and savings accounts manual than my venmo account. It appears you are at the mercy of Plaid. Maybe you need a new import partner...
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I'm another subscriber who used venmo automatic imports and now they're not working. My schwab automatic imports haven't been working for a while either. It feels like ynab is getting worse, not better
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I’m also a Subscriber who’s Venmo stopped working and now I have a ton of transactions I’m going to have to manually reconcile. This change definitely made the product and experience worse and is extremely frustrating.
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This is ridiculous. Every time I think I have my ynab workflow down, you guys pull the rug out from under me. For those who were unaware, venmo USED TO BE SUPPORTED. The only reason I can imagine they removed support was because you would get duplicated transactions on your venmo account and your bank account if you spent beyond your venmo balance. Simple fix: just delete the duplicate transactions in the venmo ledger. This is not that hard. Why you felt the need to bubble wrap this tiny wrinkle in the app and piss everyone off is beyond me.
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Does anyone know of any good alternatives to ynab? I'm specifically looking for apps that DON'T SHRINK THE FEATURE SET.
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Violet Panther I get that this is frustrating. I can offer a little bit of context.
Venmo used to have a public API, meaning that software developers (such as our import partners) could write code to access data from Venmo in an official way. It's your data; if you want to share it with YNAB for the purposes of importing transactions, you should be able to, right?
I agree. However, Venmo shut down its API in 2016. And Venmo, like other payment platforms, tends to be active about preventing third-party applications from accessing its data, even when you (the consumer) give permission.
For a while, at least one of our import partners was able to continue to use its existing Venmo integration, but at this point, I don't think it's working at all. When this sort of thing happens, we're stuck. There isn't anything we can do to get Venmo working again for Direct Import in the short term. We can't write our own integration. We can ask our import partners to negotiate with Venmo, but they already know that people want Venmo support. Nothing YNAB can do is likely to prod the process along at all.
My advice? See if you can get your friends to use Zelle. I don't mean that to be glib. But using a service that integrates with your bank or credit union allows you to select a financial institution that works well with YNAB and avoids the "double-transfer" problem.
Let me know if you have questions.
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Matthew Thank you for that response. Although it doesn't solve the problem it at least puts the problem in the right place. It should be in an FAQ or something. Perhaps it is but I didn't see it.
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Totally agree with Silver Boat here that this information should be far more public/accessible and not buried in a forum.
Matthew it's completely understandable that these issues with financial institution APIs are often out of YNAB's hands. However, what is entirely in YNAB's hands is the ability to notify and explain to it's users when and why a connection will stop working instead of letting it silently fail and then dealing with a thread full of angry users. If I had received an email containing roughly what you just said months before the connection actually broke, then I wouldn't feel like the rug was pulled out from under me, as Violet Panther put it. You gotta maintain the user trust.
That said, I did just switch to the Mx imports and Venmo appears to be working, so I am a bit confused why your response suggests that there is nothing you can do.
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Alexander Thompson Yeah, the current status with Venmo on MX wasn't totally clear to me. Any time you have an import issue, even if it seems hopeless, please get in touch with support!
And I agree—we can improve our process for communicating about incidents.
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Thank you. It helps to know the actual issue, rather than suggesting that we don't want what we know we want.
