Chrome Toolkit for YNAB
Game Changer! If you want to control more about how YNAB functions for you, use the Chrome web browser to install the YNAB Toolkit. Go to https://Chrome.google.com/webstore , search for YNAB, and choose Add to Chrome for the Toolkit for YNAB.
This is such a hidden gem and I’m so glad I found it!
Note: This only works on the desktop version of YNAB.
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Now you can find the Toolkit for all the browsers: https://github.com/toolkit-for-ynab/toolkit-for-ynab
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Nice! Adding... Thanks for the find!
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Does anyone know if issues with the toolkit been sorted for chrome? Mine still messes around big time
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Violet Admiral (0bfd2d723ad1) I haven't had any issues recently...They are good about fixing issues that occur when YNAB does a release that causes problems with the Toolkit. They are active on the other forums, I hope they will be here as well.
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Violet Admiral (0bfd2d723ad1) That's what I was wondering too. I disabled it for a while and just reenabled it. Seems fine for now.
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Johnnie5 It's a bit tricky because we no longer have our "Extensions" section that we used to be able to use to our hearts' content, but yup, we're here.
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So... what do you feel are the benefits of the Chrome extension? What does it give you that makes YNAB more useful for you?
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^^ Same, can you explain more of what the toolkit does? What changes does it add. I am new to YNAB and don't want to confuse myself by adding too much too quickly.
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I have downloaded the kit but have not figured out what it is actually for. What am I missing?
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The toolkit adds functionality to YNAB. My favorite feature is it makes each line in the budget look like a bar graph for your goals (see image below).
Here is a list of all of the features: https://github.com/toolkit-for-ynab/toolkit-for-ynab/blob/master/README.md
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Ivory Rhythm (1777b625c430) Thank you!
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Ivory Rhythm (1777b625c430) That's helpful - and interesting! Thank you!
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Johnnie5 How do you get the icons in your categories? I like them. thanks.
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Just wanted to share this website: https://emojipedia.org/ Just copy and paste.
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Maroon Cornet (9c022f3e7d83) Here is a doc that shows how: https://docs.youneedabudget.com/article/196-using-emoji-in-your-budget
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Powder Blue Tiger Thanks!
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Johnnie5 Thanks!
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Powder Blue Tiger replying so this website gets added to my comments so I don't lose it.
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Is there a reason why the functions of the Toolkit are not rolled into the stock site for everyone to use on all platforms?
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Violet Cup (02c8bcb23602) It is not developed by the YNAB team, so it is 100% independent from the YNAB releases. I personally would love if they implemented some of the features, but I'm not sure where they stand on that idea.
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Ivory Rhythm and Violet Cup , if there are features you want to see, email us at [email protected] ! We take each and every feature request seriously because we love to know what you're wishing for.
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Jen - YNAB Team Here are two features the toolkit has that I wish YNAB would implement!
1. Spending by Payee...w/the toolkit I can look and see how much money I've spent over x-amont of months somewhere. For example, if I wanted to compare two grocery stores I frequently shop at, I can look back and see how much I've spent at each over the past X-months.
2. When I'm looking at "Income v Expense" reports for the whole year or "all dates" the report goes off the screen. You have to move the slider left and right to look at all the months. You can't condense the column size to have it fit on your screen like you would in excel (toolkit does this automatically). Makes it easier to analyze and compare months without getting disoriented.
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Slate Blue Projector, we're working on a process for this in the forum, but for now you'll want to continue sending those over to [email protected] :) In the meantime, I'll make sure these two get sent along to our design team! Thanks!
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Jen I'd also love to see an option to track account balance over time, and not just per month. I try to move as much of my buffer as I can from checking to a high yield savings account, and there's no good way I can find right now in YNAB to gauge how much I need to leave to avoid ever getting below a certain balance.
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Beige Stallion sorry for the delay! I was out for the holiday. 😀
We'd probably recommend closing out that savings account and keeping just the checking. Check out our Simplify Guide for more on that radical advice. We've found that the extra work required to shuffle money between accounts just isn't work the pennies on the dollar from the interest on the savings account.
I'll pass this along to the team as well, though. I'm sure you're not the only one wishing you could easily know the minimum needed in your checking account!
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TEX_YNAB07 How do you see Spending by Payee? Is it in reports?
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YES! I love the extension! I never understood why so many people sang its praise until I downloaded it and played around.
Gray Drum (1d39fb44f280) and Slate Blue Sidewinder (4c70a8ff4fbe) , there are several things I love! I encourage you to download it and check it out!
The number one thing I LOVE about the extension is running balance. I don't understand why YNAB hasn't added this feature back in, and honestly, until I added it on the extension I truly didn't understand what all the hub-bub was about. BUT I LOVE IT! Running balance allows me to see what future transactions will do to my balance. I used this feature to plan out how to pay down my credit card debit. Yes, I also used YNAB's goal feature - set the date a year an a half ahead and dutifully pay how much YNAB says I need to pay for the next 16 months. HOWEVER, with running balance I could then put in all of my future transactions and SEE how paying JUST $*** more per month actually meant I could pay down my credit card significantly faster. Because of this one feature on the extension, I was able to see my debt, plan for it, and then aggressively target it. I paid off $10,500 in 11 months because I could visualize how putting more money to that goal would make a difference over the course of more than a year. The goal feature really just doesn't do that for me...I need to SEE how all the numbers interact.
Other features I LOVE about the extension - it can make the To Be Budgeted orange if you have money left over to be budgeted (a good visual reminder that you have more to budget), you can hide the question mark in the corner, you can hide your referral link on the left side, you can change the colors to high contrast (if you are visually impaired and need this - or color bind), you can blur out your account balances unless you hover over them (awesome in a crowded work space if you are looking at your budget!), customize flag names, change it so the current month is a different color in the header (which limits accidentally budgeting the wrong month), etc.
Really, it lets you customize a lot about YNAB which is great. Do you need to add the extension, nope. Will it possibly let you do one new nifty thing in YNAB that you soon will realize you can't live without? Most likely. Jesse even posted in Reddit recently about how great the extension was. :)
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Forest Green Wizard (40e6ab07ca02) Thank you so much for the detailed explanation of some of the features you enjoy and - especially useful - how you leverage those features to your benefit! I'll totally be looking at how I can use this going forward!!!
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Slate Blue Sidewinder (4c70a8ff4fbe) Glad it was useful! I'd love to hear an update after you check it out and see what features you love! :) It seems like there's something for everyone to love in that toolkit!
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I had no idea this existed! COOL!
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Toolkit Developer here (I just got invited to the new forums :D)
We're definitely going to be lurking these forums! I'm going to reach out to YNAB and make sure we get our own section in these forums as we did in the Legacy forms. Glad to hear people love the toolkit!
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I'm a very longtime user of YNAB and I'm another person who LOVES the Toolkit feature. I'll echo a few other comments about the running balance, budget to 0 in categories, and the ability for some customization. YNAB is great without the Toolkit, but having some of the added features takes it to the next level. I would definitely recommend installing it. The other thing I really like is that you can turn features on and off to suit your needs.
Thanks again for the group of users who got together and in their spare time created a wonderful tool to add to the use of a product that I love and use like maybe 20 times a day!
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I'm fairly new to YNAB; still learned the ropes. I figured I'd take your word for it. So I got it!
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I haven’t used it yet, but I am replying because I want to see what my new handle will be.
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Thank you! Thank you! Thank you, for sharing this loonsy ! I love this extension.
I waited an eternity to switch over to nYNAB because so many of the changes they were making didn't make any sense and I knew they would drive me nuts. (Not being able to see the running account balance or input check book numbers were the two biggest issues for me.) The ability to WAM on the fly eventually won me over but the changes put a serious dent in my enjoyment of the budgeting process. The extension takes care of the majority of things I had issue with. If I had known this existed I would have switched much sooner.
I'm a high school business teacher and teach a personal finance class. I used to plug YNAB every chance that I got but don't feel like I can recommend it anymore with the new version. That might change now. I'll tell my students they have to make sure to get the extension along with it.
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I recently installed the Toolkit too. I'm loving it so far!
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I have tried several times to install the extension for chrome .. but it keeps coming back saying an error has occurred?
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ddheidi You're trying to install it from this link, right? https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/toolkit-for-ynab/lmhdkkhepllpnondndgpgclfjnlofgjl
And you're using a modern/recent version of Chrome? Maybe double check for Chrome updates?
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I love the extension, but now my budget category is so short it is hard to read. I read the readme, but do not see the cute bar graph mentioned above.
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Hot Pink Elk (187187b83d5d) After you've installed the extension, make sure to click on the green plus icon that should appear in Chrome's toolbar (most likely in the far right corner), then in the popup that appears, on the green "Open Settings" button. You'll get a menu which allows you to toggle various Toolkit features on and off. Save after you're done making changes, then refresh YNAB. Most settings are off by default, since the Toolkit has a lot of options and we don't want to make it too confusing.
I believe the "cute bar graph" is the "Budget Rows Progress Bars" setting within the "Budget" tab of the settings. Note that some users are currently having trouble with that particular feature, due to a conflict between it and YNAB's new-ish adjustments to the credit card categories. I submitted a couple fixes this weekend, and hopefully we'll have an updated release out later this week for those who are having issues.
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Thanks!
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When I logged into YNAB this morning, I got a popup notification that the Toolkit had been updated and a link to follow to see the changes. Clicking on the link, I ended up in a multi-step process to transition over to the new YNAB forums. Now I cannot find any thread that details the most recent changes to the Toolkit. Where can I read up on that? I want to know what has changed. Thanks.
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RobbW The release announcement is here: https://forum.youneedabudget.com/discussion/55363/announcing-toolkit-for-ynab-v1-5-0 . Realistically, we probably need to find a place for announcements that isn't hidden behind a forum login...
List of changes:
- Fix split shortcut #1082 (falkencreative)
- Remove budget to zero #1081 (falkencreative)
- Fix 921 #1080 (falkencreative)
- Fix 722 #1079 (falkencreative)
- Fix 1074 #1077 (falkencreative)
- Fix for #731 #1072 (falkencreative)
- Settings CSS Fix #1071 (falkencreative)
- Budget Category Info Fix #1070 (falkencreative)
- Goal Progress Bar Fixes #1069 (falkencreative)
- Reconciled Text Color Updates #1067 (falkencreative)
- Fixes / Improvements for #117 #1066 (falkencreative)
- Update / Fix for #1053 #1065 (falkencreative)
- Removed Transfer Jump Hidden Feature #1064 (falkencreative)
- Move hide Age of Money Feature #1063 (falkencreative)
- Budget Balance to Zero Fix #1062 (falkencreative)
- Implement auto-adjusting of split transactions #1061 (ksmithbaylor)
- Feature budget-category-info fix #1060 (Twizzes)
- Removed ActivityTransactionLink Feature #1059 (falkencreative)
- Fixed Rectify button for feature check-credit-balances #1058 (Twizzes)
- Fix issue #1037 #1056 (dbaldon)
- Move toggleSplits feature to sauce #1052 (Toeler)
- Fix 1025 and 1030 #1050 (dbaldon)
- press enter in move money popup to click OK #1045 (xandroxygen)
- Feature master toggle #1043 (TAPE-SPEED)
- Days of Buffering texts are now translatable #1041 (kimifoud)
- Issue 1017: Updating privacy mode text #1036 (MattJGlick)
- Removed calls to no longer available logging function #1035 (jprzepiorski)
- Refactor check credit balances #1033 (dbaldon)
- Bug with Days of Buffering with no Age of Money #1032 (MattJGlick)
- Make Sidebar and Save/Cancel buttons always visible. #1010 (TAPE-SPEED)
The majority of the changes are bugfixes and minor improvements to make existing features work better, removing features that YNAB has now built out, or changes that will pay off in the future (we're working to support Firefox again, for example). New features:
- Ability to automatically split the remainder of a transaction between the splits (useful for taxes, for example)
- Ability to quickly toggle all Toolkit features off without disabling the Toolkit extension entirely
- Ability to hit "enter" on the keyboard to submit the Move Money popup
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Ben I think we should be linking to the GitHub release page for the new version for the time being. I'll update the code if I get a chance.
Long term, it might make sense for us to have our own forum or blog for these types of content, but I'm resisting it because it feels like a distraction.
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I just got a new laptop but my toolkit has disapperaed...any ideas?
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Jo The toolkit is a browser feature so it has to be enabled on every single browser that you use. If you got a new machine you have to add it back in. In Chrome I think you go to Menu/More Tools/Extensions and in Firefox you Menu/AddOns.
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Jo I just google "YNAB toolkit" and it's usually the first search result :)
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jenmas Vibrant I had it turned off....still had some wonky issues going on but I think I figured it out and have found my missing transactions etc. Thanks for the replies!
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SOS, please. I love the toolkit but think it's causing a really random problem I can't solve. My column widths re-adjusted themselves so the Category column is super-narrow and it's driving me crazy. I can't readjust them by grabbing the lines and moving them. Any other ideas?
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ClimbingOutOfDebt you could try turning off the adjustable column widths feature? I can look into this more when I'm at my computer but that should resolve your current issue.
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The toolkit is great but I found it a bit daunting when I first got started with YNAB, lots of extra features but not sure why I needed them. I tried it for a week then uninstalled it but after a couple of months I'm back to using it all the time now.
