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
