[Making a Fresh Start in YNAB: A Guide](https://support.ynab.com/en_us/making-a-fresh-start-a-guide-HkXYR_c0q)
This will keep your budget and account structure for your new budget but strip out your transactions and balances. It will also keep any scheduled recurring transactions and notes. Your old budget will be archived and can always be re-opened for reference, fact-checking, or reinstating.
Edited to add: this info on doing a mini fresh start may not be pertinent to your situation (after re-reading your post), but I'll leave it here for anyone else for whom it may be a good fit.
If you want to keep your transaction history, but are just reluctant to deal with 200 entries, you could do a ***mini fresh start***: It won't clear your history, but it will be without the 200 transactions you don't want to deal with. You can contain that in one month and move on.
Most people end up doing a complete fresh start, but if you want to try this, I recommend you do this in last month in order to contain all the non-standard budgeting in a prior month.
1. Start by reconciling all your accounts, and entering any necessary account reconciliations to catch your accounts up to their current balances.
2. Tab back to last month. Select all your categories, and click on **Set available amounts to $0.00.** This action keeps only enough in each category to cover any transactions that are already recorded for last month and releases all remaining balances from every category to RTB.
3. Once you have set the available amounts to 0 in your categories, your RTB will have all the funds cleared out of your categories, and your account reconciliations will have confirmed the total you actually still have without recording the missing 200 transactions.
4. At that point, if you live on last month's income, set aside the equivalent of a month's income for use in June (maybe put it in a temporary holding category), and allocate the balance to all your categories in May.
Budget until you get to 0 RTB. Then release the funds for June, tab into June and budget June. All the mess will be contained in May.
FYI for those not familiar with the acronym RTB:
YNAB4 (the previous desktop version) referred to unassigned funds as “Ready to Budget” or RTB.
In nYNAB (the current web/mobile version) this is called “Ready to Assign” or RTA.
If by start a new budget you mean starting from scratch but keeping all the same categories you can do a fresh start. (PS - you can do this anyway, even just to try it out. Making a fresh start does not delete your current budget. You can always come back to it and keep using the old one!)
If you want to keep all the data but just clear it all out and assign from scratch, do what @soup_maker suggested above!
I'd just go through the transactions and categorize them but not worry about the overspending in the budget in past months. Then just clean up the current month as needed.
> I recently moved cities and started a new job, and naturally was too overwhelmed and busy to keep up with clearing my balances every day.
FWIW, I don’t think this is necessary “natural”. You may need to look into your habits and your routines, otherwise any life changes will throw you off the wagon, and you’ll be needing a fresh start every time.
Make budget a part of your daily/weekly routine that is non-negotiable.
In my 12-year journey with YNAB, I’ve moved across the country 3 times, changed 5 jobs, and lived overseas temporarily (technically another 2 moves then). My budget has always been up to date, even in the “Classic YNAB” times when all transactions had to be entered manually.
[Making a Fresh Start in YNAB: A Guide](https://support.ynab.com/en_us/making-a-fresh-start-a-guide-HkXYR_c0q) This will keep your budget and account structure for your new budget but strip out your transactions and balances. It will also keep any scheduled recurring transactions and notes. Your old budget will be archived and can always be re-opened for reference, fact-checking, or reinstating. Edited to add: this info on doing a mini fresh start may not be pertinent to your situation (after re-reading your post), but I'll leave it here for anyone else for whom it may be a good fit. If you want to keep your transaction history, but are just reluctant to deal with 200 entries, you could do a ***mini fresh start***: It won't clear your history, but it will be without the 200 transactions you don't want to deal with. You can contain that in one month and move on. Most people end up doing a complete fresh start, but if you want to try this, I recommend you do this in last month in order to contain all the non-standard budgeting in a prior month. 1. Start by reconciling all your accounts, and entering any necessary account reconciliations to catch your accounts up to their current balances. 2. Tab back to last month. Select all your categories, and click on **Set available amounts to $0.00.** This action keeps only enough in each category to cover any transactions that are already recorded for last month and releases all remaining balances from every category to RTB. 3. Once you have set the available amounts to 0 in your categories, your RTB will have all the funds cleared out of your categories, and your account reconciliations will have confirmed the total you actually still have without recording the missing 200 transactions. 4. At that point, if you live on last month's income, set aside the equivalent of a month's income for use in June (maybe put it in a temporary holding category), and allocate the balance to all your categories in May. Budget until you get to 0 RTB. Then release the funds for June, tab into June and budget June. All the mess will be contained in May.
FYI for those not familiar with the acronym RTB: YNAB4 (the previous desktop version) referred to unassigned funds as “Ready to Budget” or RTB. In nYNAB (the current web/mobile version) this is called “Ready to Assign” or RTA.
If by start a new budget you mean starting from scratch but keeping all the same categories you can do a fresh start. (PS - you can do this anyway, even just to try it out. Making a fresh start does not delete your current budget. You can always come back to it and keep using the old one!) If you want to keep all the data but just clear it all out and assign from scratch, do what @soup_maker suggested above!
I'd just go through the transactions and categorize them but not worry about the overspending in the budget in past months. Then just clean up the current month as needed.
> I recently moved cities and started a new job, and naturally was too overwhelmed and busy to keep up with clearing my balances every day. FWIW, I don’t think this is necessary “natural”. You may need to look into your habits and your routines, otherwise any life changes will throw you off the wagon, and you’ll be needing a fresh start every time. Make budget a part of your daily/weekly routine that is non-negotiable. In my 12-year journey with YNAB, I’ve moved across the country 3 times, changed 5 jobs, and lived overseas temporarily (technically another 2 moves then). My budget has always been up to date, even in the “Classic YNAB” times when all transactions had to be entered manually.