
I just set up Open Banking with my accounting software in 45 seconds
Why can't YNAB do this?
Literally, setting up a bank account (Barclays) to auto import into FreeAgent (my online accounting software) - took 45 seconds, including logging into my bank via my phone app to authenticate.
It's easy. Reliable. Simple. Why do YNAB not offer this? I don't pay my bank anything, but I pay you £7 a month - for what exactly?
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We're currently working on expanding into international Direct Import, and I hope we'll have something to announce soon.
Matthew That's the most promising thing I've read about this - please try and keep us informed - silence on this subject is what frustrates people -as you can see above.
Good news though 🙂👍 -
I'd like this too, but having looked into this, I'd imagine that part of the issue may be regulatory. In the UK, even if using a third party provider, you need to register with the FCA as handling financial transactions. There are fees involved (both one off and ongoing) as well as lots of paperwork. I imagine the situation is similar in the EU.
I looked into the third party options available with YNAB but obviously not ecstatic about an additional fee, plus I'd be concerned that as they don't seem to have regulatory approval (that I can see) they may be shut down at any point.
TrueLayer (a provider mentioned above) wrote a blog post on this, and their opinion was that YNAB or similar organisation _would_ need to register
- If you’re a customer of TrueLayer using us to acquire the bank data of your customers, and then you provide this consolidated data back to your customers, then you need to go through the FCA and get a RAISP, since you are providing AIS;
(from here)
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I will be brutally honest. I am getting more and more frustrated with YNAB. It moved to cloud and now its a subscription. Okay said I and moved from YNAB 4, but i see no benefits there. Only more pain now as the credit cards now totally screwed between the way they used to work.
And now I started looking into other apps. And I found them. I am currently on a trial version of several other apps. Which have the import and 4 times cheaper (20USD a year on average). So unless YNAB gets import done from Europe banks or gives me some really good reason to stay (which I am not even sure what). I will be gone by the end of this year subscription. -
I’m very pleased to see that YNAB are looking into this. YNAB has really turned my financial awareness around - perhaps to the degree that I decided not to pay for the third party subscription. I’m not sure I’ll like or use the auto-import feature - but I do think that it’s extremely important to show that YNAB are listening and supporting their customers properly. I was a bit put off a while back when I reported a bug in YNAB (dragging a downloaded file onto YNAB consistently gave a message that the file didn’t contain any transactions the first time, but imported properly the second time) and it felt like they dismissed my report. Eventually sheer persistence of reporting it they fixed the bug and my opinion of YNAB was restored.
Though my knowledge of these things is limited, it feels as though the Open Banking API should be designed in a way that YNAB should be able to integrate it without needing a third party, and I assume that avoiding third party involvement, if done properly, should be the most secure way of achieving this functionality with the least risk of privacy issues.
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There are so many apps, even before open banking, that are quick, easy and efficient for connecting bank feeds. Unfortunately non are YNAB. I got to the point where I was finished waiting (and paying) in the hope this would get to be a priority. It's not just to do with countries. A big part of the trouble is that YNABs method of importing transactions is out of the ark. It's not even allowed in the UK anymore. Because my partner likes to do things manually I still have the subscription going out of my account, but I've given up on it now. I'm still trying various other things. Emma is quite good and plays really nicely with my Starling account. I also use the 'spaces' in Starling. Starling are offering me a business account with built in books for a modest charge. At this rate, I'll end up using some kind rolling budgets/home finance directly on my personal Starling bank account before YNAB pulls its finger out.
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With respect to using other software/apps, Superbone got it right. The others aren’t YNAB and, for me, this is because no-one else provides a zero-sum budgeting solution.
People may not have heard this term before but it is the difference between arbitrarily setting individual budgets for different categories and seeing how you go against those budgets versus budgeting everything you have down to the last penny and then having to swap between those categories if you go over, that is the beauty of the YNAB offering. They make you account for all of your money in a category somewhere and so the budgets aren’t arbitrary, they are a balance/compromise across all your available funds.
I have tried all the different ones mentioned above and none of them do what YNAB does. I use syncforynab too as it is better at remembering to enter my transactions than I am. And my categories are detailed enough that auto-categorisation is rarely wrong.
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It just dawned on me that YNAB is a "USA first" company that doesn't really care about its international users. I feel slightly foolish for believing their carefully rehearsed and crafted "friendly replies", which amount to nothing but empty promises.
It feels very unfair to me that US users pay the same $11 a month as me, but they get direct import, and I don't.I also had long suspicions about why YNAB web interface is so slow, and I suspect all the servers are in California too.
I looked it up and Open Banking in UK was established in 2016 (wikipedia), and what does YNAB tell me these four years? Go get that 3rd party supplier that implemented a feature that we're not interested in implementing, and you have to pay extra for it. Or implement it yourself, here's an API. Don't bother us, we are overwhelmed with supporting US banks.
Just looked up https://www.buxfer.com and it seems very promising - envelope budgeting is not front-and-center there, but I think it might just be enough for my purposes. I have a fixed salary, and my expenses from month to month are not that different either, so 70% of my "envelopes" just get copy-pasted from month to month.
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Matthew said:
However, having had it both ways: using YNAB with and without Direct Import is a very small difference.This may be your personal opinion (and clearly that of your company), but I think you would find that most of your users disagree. That's why we're here expressing our frustration at your attitude toward supporting a reliable direct import.
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I've been using YNAB for years and have to do without DI as well. However, I think DI is overrated. I have tried almost all other tools, some of which also offer synchronization (e.g. via Saltedge) with the banks and have found that this does not work for my bank (1822direkt), although it has a PSD2 interface. As a German YNAB user, I use Outbank to access accounts and export the transactions to YNAB. I do this twice a month and it takes a few minutes and it works with all of my accounts - I don't need more. Yes, it is a bit rough that international users are paying for something that they cannot use. On the other hand, I can at least say for myself that after a long search and trial, I have not found any software that works better than YNAB.