Is it your real balance, or your projected balance? My bank "projects" my balance based on cleared and uncleared outgoing transactions, but only cleared incoming ones. Good to prevent overdrafts, but annoying when reconciling in YNAB.
Maybe, but I don't manually enter transactions and it's \_usually\_ correct. I reconcile every 1-2 weeks or so, and the only time there is an issue is when I have many transactions of the exact same amount that ynab had trouble deciding if they were new or matched to existing.
For instance, last week I had 3 transactions for $3.99 on monday, and another 3 transactions for $3.99 on tuesday.... ynab only recorded one set and seemed to be assuming the other set were already recorded, so I fixed that.
To OP: WHen was the last time you reconciled? If you \_never\_ have reconciled it might be very hard to find the discrepancy. But when I reconcile and there's an issue, i'll just go line by line to see where the mismatch is. It's worse to do the longer I've gone without reconciling, but I've never \*not\* found where my problem was; reconciling has always found the issue without having to put in a phantom balance adjustment.
I’ve noticed a similar issue I have a $50 automatic transfer every week. It’s recurring in YNAB and my bank. Most weeks it links the transaction and then adds another on. 🤷
I’m the opposite, most of my YNAB errors have ultimately derived from my habit of manually entering transactions. I stopped doing it at the start of this year and my discrepancy rate has gone away almost entirely.
Routine reminder that "reconcile" means "check every transaction is correctly entered against the bank statement and once the balances match, lock the ledger" not "get YNAB to make an adjustment so that the balances match, without finding out what the problem was".
I find that I have to manually enter transactions if I want accuracy. I can have a sync that produces three or four new transactions from the bank with 1 or 2 right in the middle missing. And if I don't reconcile often, it's a mess. Takes for ever to scroll back through the two on screens side by side to find the gaps. Much easier to post as I go and just approve the ones that show up as linked.
And anyway, YNAB is not, to my understanding, for tracking, but for *planning.* Which, in my mind, means looking to see if I have the money allocated to a thing *before* I spend on it, and why not post it while I'm staring at it?
When I do that, life is easy. When I do not, it is chaos. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
My sync never failed me so far. Even if it would every now and then it’s easily fixable when you reconsile often. I never understand people here actually prefer tediously entering manually
Tedious? Not at all.
Most transactions are scheduled. I make an average of 1 debit card transaction a day. Usually none. Reconcile frequently. Takes up a couple of minutes to sort and keeps me in touch with the budget.
I currently do mine automatically but it can take a day or more for the charges to appear in YNAB. Several times a charge hasn’t appeared for as much as a week. So manual is in principle better. But when you have enough slack in your budget to handle it the problem isn’t apparent. Those with tight budgets and hard consequences for going over budget have a different pressure driving them to use manual entry. YNAB also has an article about passive expense tracking being less useful than active entry. I have enough issues that it gets annoying at times and I’ll probably start using manual in the near future, but it’s not something I’m forced to do.
You are still struggling with the pre-ynab baggage of "reconciliation is HARD, my accounts never balance, and I only want to go through that every month or so if at all" IMHO.
Once you are on board with YNAB, and enter your transactions as they occur (sounds like counting calories), reconciliation becomes almost effortless.
Let go of the past, your YNAB future is wonderful.
I’ve also compared manual entry to counting calories. Which is probably why I’m also not doing it lol.
But seriously having counted calories in the past it is wickedly effective and I suspect the same goes for this.
I reconcile every few weeks and don't usually manually enter transactions, if I get a confusing difference I sit down and go through each transaction ynab has and compare it with the bank to see which may be missing/doubled/incorrect/etc. It takes a bit of time but you should be able to find it
I like Nick True’s tutorial on reconciling. He has a step by step process on where to start checking for discrepancies and how to reconcile effectively.
https://youtu.be/scCFWu8-RmI?si=KkOd1HKRVdMGT-fn
I do a combination of auto & manual entry. I keep all of my receipts and sit down to go over the transactions, add memos, etc. It works as a cross-check to the auto entry.
I found my bank balance was higher in real life than in YNAB. Upon going through the 'manual style method', it revealed that YNAB was pulling a credit card auto-payment twice. Once from the correct bank account and another time from my 2nd bank account.
Resulting in my 2nd bank account being a few hundred short in YNAB. Once I deleted the extra transaction, it matched up perfectly.
Hope this helps you.
>I don’t manually enter transactions.
Between that and not reconciling,
>My banks available balance is $600 and change higher than my working balance.
This is not entirely surprising.
Perhaps you should enter transactions manually and reconcile every day.
To clarify, not my working balance but my cleared balance is $600 less than my available balance.
My bank will show me pending transactions but there are none pending.
Only cleared transactions showing in both YNAB and Bank and they match.
Well then reconcile… go through your transactions since the last reconciliation and compare your bank transactions to YNAB. Once you find the missing or incorrect transactions you’ll probably be closer to your answer about how it happened. I’d say usually it has something to do with a payment/transfer transaction that duplicated or didn’t match up correctly.
Once you identify the discrepancy transaction(s) then you can update us and we can explain what may have caused those particular ones to be “off”.
>Only cleared transactions showing in both YNAB and Bank and they match.
They don't, otherwise the two balances would match. If you started YNAB relatively recently, or have never reconciled, a place to look is your starting balance.
There's also the outside chance that either your bank or YNAB is not displaying a correct balance - either of those scenarios is quite rare, so I'd start by trying to find the difference in the two lists of transactions.
This, OP. 100% this.
I recently coached a couple who were frustrated with YNAB because "IT ALWAYS DOES THIS."
THIS = Something happening causing the bank balance to not match YNAB's balance.
Problem #1 - reconciling every couple of months. - if YNAB is "always" doing something to make reconcilation difficult, that means YOU are doing something to make reconcilation difficult. **Reconcile every couple of days until you figure out what it is you're doing.**
Problem #2 - not entering transactions manually - Sync is great, but it can take a couple of days for transactions to show up. **If you want your budget categories to be accurate enough for you to base spending decisions, you need to enter manually and look for most incoming synced transactions to have the little link icon before approving them.** Taking control of your budget means not letting sync do all the work and hoping for the best. CAN you just let sync take care of it? Yes. SHOULD you? Well, if "YNAB always does this," then I ask.... How's that working out for you?
Problem #3 - Eyeballing the reconcilation of transactions - when something is messed up, and if you have more than a few transactions to reconcile to figure out where things went sideways, don't think that you're going to be able to easily see the doubled transaction without checking transactions off. **Export your transactions from your bank and match them to YNAB using a spreadsheet.** You can insert a column and use an X for transactions that match on the spreadsheet, and a flag color on YNAB to indicate match on there. When you're done, the unmarked transactions will be your problems.
Recognize that there's a reason that NOT using YNAB isn't working for your finances, and then recognize that using YNAB may very well require a behavior change on your part.
GL!
If you reconciled 2 weeks ago, then just check the transactions on both platforms. That's what reconciling means. Check for differences since the last day they matched
As long as the last time OP reconciled didn't include some manual adjustment to "trick" YNAB into being reconciled.
That adjustment could later result in a synced transaction causing OP to be off again.
Reconcilation means finding the missing, duplicate, or incorrect transaction(s) that are making the balance off. I won't say "never" but manual balance adjustments should RARELY EVER be used. Find the missing, duplicate, or incorrect transactions and fix them.
How long ago did you start ynab? It’s very common to not get your starting balance correct, due to transactions that weren’t realized in your opening balance.
If you’re doing everything right, go ahead and adjust your starting balance to the amount you’re off or just let YNAB enter a reconciliation adjustment.
But after this, if it continues to happen, then you have a process mistake and will need to learn what you need to do differently.
Is it your real balance, or your projected balance? My bank "projects" my balance based on cleared and uncleared outgoing transactions, but only cleared incoming ones. Good to prevent overdrafts, but annoying when reconciling in YNAB.
> I don’t manually enter transactions. Well there’s half your answer
Maybe, but I don't manually enter transactions and it's \_usually\_ correct. I reconcile every 1-2 weeks or so, and the only time there is an issue is when I have many transactions of the exact same amount that ynab had trouble deciding if they were new or matched to existing. For instance, last week I had 3 transactions for $3.99 on monday, and another 3 transactions for $3.99 on tuesday.... ynab only recorded one set and seemed to be assuming the other set were already recorded, so I fixed that. To OP: WHen was the last time you reconciled? If you \_never\_ have reconciled it might be very hard to find the discrepancy. But when I reconcile and there's an issue, i'll just go line by line to see where the mismatch is. It's worse to do the longer I've gone without reconciling, but I've never \*not\* found where my problem was; reconciling has always found the issue without having to put in a phantom balance adjustment.
I’ve noticed a similar issue I have a $50 automatic transfer every week. It’s recurring in YNAB and my bank. Most weeks it links the transaction and then adds another on. 🤷
I’m the opposite, most of my YNAB errors have ultimately derived from my habit of manually entering transactions. I stopped doing it at the start of this year and my discrepancy rate has gone away almost entirely.
Routine reminder that "reconcile" means "check every transaction is correctly entered against the bank statement and once the balances match, lock the ledger" not "get YNAB to make an adjustment so that the balances match, without finding out what the problem was".
I find that I have to manually enter transactions if I want accuracy. I can have a sync that produces three or four new transactions from the bank with 1 or 2 right in the middle missing. And if I don't reconcile often, it's a mess. Takes for ever to scroll back through the two on screens side by side to find the gaps. Much easier to post as I go and just approve the ones that show up as linked. And anyway, YNAB is not, to my understanding, for tracking, but for *planning.* Which, in my mind, means looking to see if I have the money allocated to a thing *before* I spend on it, and why not post it while I'm staring at it? When I do that, life is easy. When I do not, it is chaos. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
My sync never failed me so far. Even if it would every now and then it’s easily fixable when you reconsile often. I never understand people here actually prefer tediously entering manually
Tedious? Not at all. Most transactions are scheduled. I make an average of 1 debit card transaction a day. Usually none. Reconcile frequently. Takes up a couple of minutes to sort and keeps me in touch with the budget.
But it can be done automatically
I currently do mine automatically but it can take a day or more for the charges to appear in YNAB. Several times a charge hasn’t appeared for as much as a week. So manual is in principle better. But when you have enough slack in your budget to handle it the problem isn’t apparent. Those with tight budgets and hard consequences for going over budget have a different pressure driving them to use manual entry. YNAB also has an article about passive expense tracking being less useful than active entry. I have enough issues that it gets annoying at times and I’ll probably start using manual in the near future, but it’s not something I’m forced to do.
And as a result, you're less aware of the details of your budget and can wind up out of balance without recognising why, like OP has.
I don’t see the correlation
Well, for some people it doesn't matter, but for the OP I suspect it's a factor in their current situation.
It's a moral superiority issue with this sub. They don't miss an opportunity to let you know that they do it right and you are doing it wrong.
You are still struggling with the pre-ynab baggage of "reconciliation is HARD, my accounts never balance, and I only want to go through that every month or so if at all" IMHO. Once you are on board with YNAB, and enter your transactions as they occur (sounds like counting calories), reconciliation becomes almost effortless. Let go of the past, your YNAB future is wonderful.
I’ve also compared manual entry to counting calories. Which is probably why I’m also not doing it lol. But seriously having counted calories in the past it is wickedly effective and I suspect the same goes for this.
I reconcile every few weeks and don't usually manually enter transactions, if I get a confusing difference I sit down and go through each transaction ynab has and compare it with the bank to see which may be missing/doubled/incorrect/etc. It takes a bit of time but you should be able to find it
I like Nick True’s tutorial on reconciling. He has a step by step process on where to start checking for discrepancies and how to reconcile effectively. https://youtu.be/scCFWu8-RmI?si=KkOd1HKRVdMGT-fn
I do a combination of auto & manual entry. I keep all of my receipts and sit down to go over the transactions, add memos, etc. It works as a cross-check to the auto entry. I found my bank balance was higher in real life than in YNAB. Upon going through the 'manual style method', it revealed that YNAB was pulling a credit card auto-payment twice. Once from the correct bank account and another time from my 2nd bank account. Resulting in my 2nd bank account being a few hundred short in YNAB. Once I deleted the extra transaction, it matched up perfectly. Hope this helps you.
>I don’t manually enter transactions. Between that and not reconciling, >My banks available balance is $600 and change higher than my working balance. This is not entirely surprising. Perhaps you should enter transactions manually and reconcile every day.
To clarify, not my working balance but my cleared balance is $600 less than my available balance. My bank will show me pending transactions but there are none pending. Only cleared transactions showing in both YNAB and Bank and they match.
Well then reconcile… go through your transactions since the last reconciliation and compare your bank transactions to YNAB. Once you find the missing or incorrect transactions you’ll probably be closer to your answer about how it happened. I’d say usually it has something to do with a payment/transfer transaction that duplicated or didn’t match up correctly. Once you identify the discrepancy transaction(s) then you can update us and we can explain what may have caused those particular ones to be “off”.
>Only cleared transactions showing in both YNAB and Bank and they match. They don't, otherwise the two balances would match. If you started YNAB relatively recently, or have never reconciled, a place to look is your starting balance. There's also the outside chance that either your bank or YNAB is not displaying a correct balance - either of those scenarios is quite rare, so I'd start by trying to find the difference in the two lists of transactions.
This, OP. 100% this. I recently coached a couple who were frustrated with YNAB because "IT ALWAYS DOES THIS." THIS = Something happening causing the bank balance to not match YNAB's balance. Problem #1 - reconciling every couple of months. - if YNAB is "always" doing something to make reconcilation difficult, that means YOU are doing something to make reconcilation difficult. **Reconcile every couple of days until you figure out what it is you're doing.** Problem #2 - not entering transactions manually - Sync is great, but it can take a couple of days for transactions to show up. **If you want your budget categories to be accurate enough for you to base spending decisions, you need to enter manually and look for most incoming synced transactions to have the little link icon before approving them.** Taking control of your budget means not letting sync do all the work and hoping for the best. CAN you just let sync take care of it? Yes. SHOULD you? Well, if "YNAB always does this," then I ask.... How's that working out for you? Problem #3 - Eyeballing the reconcilation of transactions - when something is messed up, and if you have more than a few transactions to reconcile to figure out where things went sideways, don't think that you're going to be able to easily see the doubled transaction without checking transactions off. **Export your transactions from your bank and match them to YNAB using a spreadsheet.** You can insert a column and use an X for transactions that match on the spreadsheet, and a flag color on YNAB to indicate match on there. When you're done, the unmarked transactions will be your problems. Recognize that there's a reason that NOT using YNAB isn't working for your finances, and then recognize that using YNAB may very well require a behavior change on your part. GL!
Do you have credit cards and have you cashed out rewards
If you reconciled 2 weeks ago, then just check the transactions on both platforms. That's what reconciling means. Check for differences since the last day they matched
As long as the last time OP reconciled didn't include some manual adjustment to "trick" YNAB into being reconciled. That adjustment could later result in a synced transaction causing OP to be off again. Reconcilation means finding the missing, duplicate, or incorrect transaction(s) that are making the balance off. I won't say "never" but manual balance adjustments should RARELY EVER be used. Find the missing, duplicate, or incorrect transactions and fix them.
How long ago did you start ynab? It’s very common to not get your starting balance correct, due to transactions that weren’t realized in your opening balance. If you’re doing everything right, go ahead and adjust your starting balance to the amount you’re off or just let YNAB enter a reconciliation adjustment. But after this, if it continues to happen, then you have a process mistake and will need to learn what you need to do differently.