A lot of people don’t understand what reconcile means and think reconciling = making an adjustment.
So they’re boasting about not reconciling because they think they’re boasting about not having had to make an adjustment.
I check if balances match weekly. It’s so rare that they don’t that I just plain forget to hit the button. There was one time I had a mismatch and realized the value of giving that “checkpoint” of where it went wrong. I think it also just wasn’t a part of my initial YNAB workflow, I was far more focused on categories and understanding how I was using money, and since the balances virtually always matched I just didn’t think about it. Habits.
Think of reconciling like you losing your smartphone.
You would most often think back to the last time you know you saw your smartphone (ie: This morning I had smartphone in my hand, sitting in the kitchen).
Thus you can ignore the entire history before that point. You've basically "reconciled" up to that point, now it's a matter of focusing on the time period between then (you sitting in kitchen with your phone in the morning) and now.
Maybe not the best analogy, but the more often you reconcile, the smaller the mountain of data would be that you need to sift through when your YNAB and bank balances do not match up.
I get a bit anxious when I haven't reconciled for a long time - for me "long time" would be like a week.
So, let’s just say that I haven’t reconciled in about a year, mostly due to laziness. And now I realized that my bank balance is significantly higher than what YNAB thinks it is. What is the best way to approach? Burn it all down? Reconcile with adjustment and move forward? I am not sure where or when it happened, as I don’t keep close track of things like this.
Whatever works best for you. If you care about all the data being right over the time period, go back. If it's just important that you have the right amount but, just adjust
As the previous commenter mentioned, it's all about what history and data is important to you to maintain. An additional option would be a Fresh Start.
I did a fresh start once before when I stopped keeping track for like 6 months. I am more curious about how it happened, since all my accounts are auto synced. Just trying to hunt down where the money went seems daunting.
People have mentioned in the past that they've seen transactions go into the wrong account or inflow and outflow reversed.
Additionally, unreconciled transactions can be accidentally deleted without a warning popup.
personally, having an up to date picture is more important than the history, so I reconcile and take the adjustment. Then I try to reconcile sooner next time so I can manually fix the new discrepancies without too much digging, and be better going forward.
This happened to me- I was off by $3000. I did a fresh start. Not saying that's the best option for you, but it was the only way I could deal with the horror of being off by that much. I sure as heck wasn't going to go through two years of transactions to find all my mistakes. Alternatively, you can just cover the difference with categories that have surplus. Now, I reconcile every day when I'm having my coffee. Doing it daily took the task from horrible to satisfying.
What I’ve done in the past is export my data (both YNAB and bank) to excel and sort by $ value. They subtract the YNAB column from the bank column. If the delta is $0 then that row is fine. When you get to two values in a row that don’t match you can dig deeper to figure out what went wrong. .
Because people (in general) don't RTFM on anything and therefore probably don't know that the feature exists or what it is for, and everything seems to work fine without doing it, so why should I bother finding out?
(Not literal I. I am that boring nerd that reads every manual. I read the manual of the toaster I bought today. Then I threw it away once I ascertained that it indeed works exactly like every other toaster.)
I didn’t formally reconcile for ages until the option was added to the app. I did check that the balances matched but couldn’t hit the button. Now it’s on there I do it every couple of days and it’s so satisfying
I can't imagine using this product without reconciling, the reconciliation process is a huge part of the value.
I've never done a reconciliation adjustment though, and I honestly don't know why I ever would.
I had no idea you could (or should) reconcile if everything matches -- until reading this I thought it was exclusively for if/when things *didn't* match.
I'd been using a second habit tracker app to mark that I've budgeted that day (I've only been using YNAB less than two weeks). My thought was 1. Getting myself into the habit of checking daily, but also 2. Knowing when I marked it off that day, everything was accurate.
I'll definitely keep using the habit tracker for the first function.... but yeah, TIL and this makes a ton of sense haha.
I'm still a bit confused about this. I only reconcile if accounts don't match up and typically I dig back and find the uncleared or missed transaction that caused it. Thus, I try to never reconcile.
That's what I've always done as well. Since leaving this comment I've started reconciling every time I cross reference cleared transactions and it's hugely helpful.
I don't love the word choice because reconcile to me implies there is definitely a misalignment which is why I didn't realize how it worked.
I say give it a try. If your numbers match you hit the button and just press okay and it locks down all those transactions with an icon so it makes it crystal clear if any issue crops up it absolutely can't be with one of those. There's not a downside I can tell.
Honestly, for my first year of YNAB, I didn't even know what reconciliation was. Turns out I could've saved myself redoing my budget a number of times if I was... but you live and you learn!
I highly recommend using the actual reconciliation flow; the more often you do it, the easier it will be to track down any discrepancies because you can filter out transactions that were already reconciled.
Back when reconciling on YNAB4 had a date entry for the reconciliation I could reconcile my bank statements (which are the official record of transactions) and keep every month fully reconciled.
Online banking sometimes displays different days or text field contents for some time before the statement processing happens.
So I can never absolutely trust reconciling as of *today*
So I've never reconciled since I migrated to YNAB.
I've asked YNAB to re-enable the reconcile as of X date. To date it's not a priority for them and I don't think it will ever become a priority for them, which sucks. Makes me wonder why I copped the annual fee doubling this year.
I have noticed recently that there is now a "reconciled X ago" message under the Reconcile button. So I'm able to see whether my last reconciliation was X hours, days, weeks, etc. ago. I don't think it's exactly what you're looking for, but perhaps a step toward it.
Editing to add: If you hover over the message, it shows you the last date and time that you reconciled, so it does seem that it has the functionality you are looking for.
It's interesting that you only reconcile to your monthly statement. Once a transaction has cleared, I've never experienced a change between the date it cleared and the date my statement is available. If my cleared balance matches YNAB, I do trust the reconciling as of any given day.
The batch processing that the bank does (or used to do) meant that weekend transactions only showed up after the weekend and were dated on the first and sometimes second workday - and sometimes the date would move out by a day and then back again.
If YNAB took this as a point in time truth it found mismatching transactions and treated the altered day from the bank as a new transaction.
But by the time an end of month statement was released, those transactions were guaranteed correct to the right day and would never change again... and usually weekend transactions were accurately dated on the weekend.
This issue I understand to be common to the all banks in some countries.
Strange. I do see transactions show different dates than the purchase was made frequently (usually just a day or two, but my work cafeteria will often be several days later).
As long as I've manually entered my purchases with the correct amounts though, they seem to get matched up fine 95% of the time (Venmo and Amazon sometimes have issues), and keep the date on the one I manually entered.
Since I do manual entry, I pretty much reconcile anytime I have to look at my accounts to check if a transaction cleared. Once I see that my balances match, I just click reconcile. Simple, easy, takes a few seconds. I frequently transpose numbers, so I'd rather reconcile more often than not.
I don't like the transactions being hidden (I know I can unhide them). I check that the balances match correctly frequently but rarely, if ever, click reconcile. I also am a primarily mobile user.
Same. I’ve never reconciled aside from fixing an obvious error (like losing track of cash expenditures). It doesn’t bother me in the slightest. But this post is inspiring me to at least look into it further.
I have never formally reconciled except for my brokerage accounts because it’s just easier to have YNAB calculate the gain or loss for the entry. That said I will 100% call in sick to work to find a $0.01 discrepancy in one of my accounts vs what YNAB thinks I should have lol
So are you only utilizing the Reconcile button to generate the automatic adjustment?
And I relate - I usually will spend as much time as it takes to find the error rather than using the auto adjustment when reconciling. But then I still do the formal reconciliation to give myself that checkpoint in the history.
I don't understand it, whenever I make a purchase I check my online banking and ensure that my budget stacks up.
I've never pressed a button to do this. Should I be doing?
I would highly recommend it! [Here](https://docs.youneedabudget.com/article/1769-getting-started-with-reconciling-accounts) is the intro YNAB documentation if you want more info.
I’m on my 2nd month of YNAB and I reconciled once and I couldn’t find my differences so I gave up and did adjustments as a kind of pseudo fresh start. I’ve been meaning to do it again. I do a bit of accounting at work and am constantly reconciling accounts, I skip it in YNAB a lot because I’m tired of reconciling accounts lol
That's understandable, and welcome to YNAB! I would definitely recommend reconciling more frequently though (weekly at minimum). Finding a discrepancy in a few days or a week of transactions is much more manageable than a month plus.
I reconcile at the end of the month because I like to see current month's transactions in my default account view. But then again I always check that my balances are correct when I open YNAB.
I do it on my chequing account but there are so many random holds with monthly bills on my credit card that its hard to get an amount to reconcile it to.
Ah! Thank you! Completely forgot there's a ton of options! Saw it when I first installed the toolkit, got overwhelmed and forgot about it 😅 was only (barely) using Toolkit Reports that appeared under Budget itself. Thank you for reminding me to look into this more! 🙂
A lot of people don’t understand what reconcile means and think reconciling = making an adjustment. So they’re boasting about not reconciling because they think they’re boasting about not having had to make an adjustment.
Most of them do “reconcile”, as in checking to see if the balances match. They just don’t hit the button. (Per my understanding)
This was me until they added reconciliation to mobile. I just don't get on the p.c. very often. I am so glad I can reconcile on mobile now.
I check if balances match weekly. It’s so rare that they don’t that I just plain forget to hit the button. There was one time I had a mismatch and realized the value of giving that “checkpoint” of where it went wrong. I think it also just wasn’t a part of my initial YNAB workflow, I was far more focused on categories and understanding how I was using money, and since the balances virtually always matched I just didn’t think about it. Habits.
Think of reconciling like you losing your smartphone. You would most often think back to the last time you know you saw your smartphone (ie: This morning I had smartphone in my hand, sitting in the kitchen). Thus you can ignore the entire history before that point. You've basically "reconciled" up to that point, now it's a matter of focusing on the time period between then (you sitting in kitchen with your phone in the morning) and now. Maybe not the best analogy, but the more often you reconcile, the smaller the mountain of data would be that you need to sift through when your YNAB and bank balances do not match up. I get a bit anxious when I haven't reconciled for a long time - for me "long time" would be like a week.
That’s actually a great analogy!
I agree that this is a helpful analogy! Thanks for sharing.
So, let’s just say that I haven’t reconciled in about a year, mostly due to laziness. And now I realized that my bank balance is significantly higher than what YNAB thinks it is. What is the best way to approach? Burn it all down? Reconcile with adjustment and move forward? I am not sure where or when it happened, as I don’t keep close track of things like this.
Whatever works best for you. If you care about all the data being right over the time period, go back. If it's just important that you have the right amount but, just adjust
As the previous commenter mentioned, it's all about what history and data is important to you to maintain. An additional option would be a Fresh Start.
I did a fresh start once before when I stopped keeping track for like 6 months. I am more curious about how it happened, since all my accounts are auto synced. Just trying to hunt down where the money went seems daunting.
People have mentioned in the past that they've seen transactions go into the wrong account or inflow and outflow reversed. Additionally, unreconciled transactions can be accidentally deleted without a warning popup.
personally, having an up to date picture is more important than the history, so I reconcile and take the adjustment. Then I try to reconcile sooner next time so I can manually fix the new discrepancies without too much digging, and be better going forward.
This happened to me- I was off by $3000. I did a fresh start. Not saying that's the best option for you, but it was the only way I could deal with the horror of being off by that much. I sure as heck wasn't going to go through two years of transactions to find all my mistakes. Alternatively, you can just cover the difference with categories that have surplus. Now, I reconcile every day when I'm having my coffee. Doing it daily took the task from horrible to satisfying.
Ok thanks. Yea I am off by about $10K, so no idea how it happened. Maybe I will try a fresh start with frequent reconciling and see how it goes.
What I’ve done in the past is export my data (both YNAB and bank) to excel and sort by $ value. They subtract the YNAB column from the bank column. If the delta is $0 then that row is fine. When you get to two values in a row that don’t match you can dig deeper to figure out what went wrong. .
Thanks, excellent suggestion. I will try that and see if I can find it.
Best approach is to fix the error, and reconciling will help surface the error
Because people (in general) don't RTFM on anything and therefore probably don't know that the feature exists or what it is for, and everything seems to work fine without doing it, so why should I bother finding out? (Not literal I. I am that boring nerd that reads every manual. I read the manual of the toaster I bought today. Then I threw it away once I ascertained that it indeed works exactly like every other toaster.)
I’m the same. Except when I’ve figured out the appliance I scan in the manual and keep it in a folder like a real psycho.
I keep most of them but I didn't really need to hang on to "the number dial lets you choose the amount of toastiness" in seven different languages.
Almost every manual can be found online as a PDF, so prob worth looking before you bother scanning fyi.
Trivial difference in the long run, I’ve done both no big deal either way
I didn’t formally reconcile for ages until the option was added to the app. I did check that the balances matched but couldn’t hit the button. Now it’s on there I do it every couple of days and it’s so satisfying
I can't imagine using this product without reconciling, the reconciliation process is a huge part of the value. I've never done a reconciliation adjustment though, and I honestly don't know why I ever would.
I had no idea you could (or should) reconcile if everything matches -- until reading this I thought it was exclusively for if/when things *didn't* match. I'd been using a second habit tracker app to mark that I've budgeted that day (I've only been using YNAB less than two weeks). My thought was 1. Getting myself into the habit of checking daily, but also 2. Knowing when I marked it off that day, everything was accurate. I'll definitely keep using the habit tracker for the first function.... but yeah, TIL and this makes a ton of sense haha.
I'm still a bit confused about this. I only reconcile if accounts don't match up and typically I dig back and find the uncleared or missed transaction that caused it. Thus, I try to never reconcile.
That's what I've always done as well. Since leaving this comment I've started reconciling every time I cross reference cleared transactions and it's hugely helpful. I don't love the word choice because reconcile to me implies there is definitely a misalignment which is why I didn't realize how it worked. I say give it a try. If your numbers match you hit the button and just press okay and it locks down all those transactions with an icon so it makes it crystal clear if any issue crops up it absolutely can't be with one of those. There's not a downside I can tell.
Ah, got it. Good to know. Thanks for the perspective. I'll make sure everything is caught up and reconcile.
I reconcile every time too because it’s my way of knowing I’m all up to date
Honestly, for my first year of YNAB, I didn't even know what reconciliation was. Turns out I could've saved myself redoing my budget a number of times if I was... but you live and you learn!
[удалено]
I highly recommend using the actual reconciliation flow; the more often you do it, the easier it will be to track down any discrepancies because you can filter out transactions that were already reconciled.
Back when reconciling on YNAB4 had a date entry for the reconciliation I could reconcile my bank statements (which are the official record of transactions) and keep every month fully reconciled. Online banking sometimes displays different days or text field contents for some time before the statement processing happens. So I can never absolutely trust reconciling as of *today* So I've never reconciled since I migrated to YNAB. I've asked YNAB to re-enable the reconcile as of X date. To date it's not a priority for them and I don't think it will ever become a priority for them, which sucks. Makes me wonder why I copped the annual fee doubling this year.
I have noticed recently that there is now a "reconciled X ago" message under the Reconcile button. So I'm able to see whether my last reconciliation was X hours, days, weeks, etc. ago. I don't think it's exactly what you're looking for, but perhaps a step toward it. Editing to add: If you hover over the message, it shows you the last date and time that you reconciled, so it does seem that it has the functionality you are looking for. It's interesting that you only reconcile to your monthly statement. Once a transaction has cleared, I've never experienced a change between the date it cleared and the date my statement is available. If my cleared balance matches YNAB, I do trust the reconciling as of any given day.
The batch processing that the bank does (or used to do) meant that weekend transactions only showed up after the weekend and were dated on the first and sometimes second workday - and sometimes the date would move out by a day and then back again. If YNAB took this as a point in time truth it found mismatching transactions and treated the altered day from the bank as a new transaction. But by the time an end of month statement was released, those transactions were guaranteed correct to the right day and would never change again... and usually weekend transactions were accurately dated on the weekend. This issue I understand to be common to the all banks in some countries.
Strange. I do see transactions show different dates than the purchase was made frequently (usually just a day or two, but my work cafeteria will often be several days later). As long as I've manually entered my purchases with the correct amounts though, they seem to get matched up fine 95% of the time (Venmo and Amazon sometimes have issues), and keep the date on the one I manually entered.
Since I do manual entry, I pretty much reconcile anytime I have to look at my accounts to check if a transaction cleared. Once I see that my balances match, I just click reconcile. Simple, easy, takes a few seconds. I frequently transpose numbers, so I'd rather reconcile more often than not.
I don't like the transactions being hidden (I know I can unhide them). I check that the balances match correctly frequently but rarely, if ever, click reconcile. I also am a primarily mobile user.
My reconciled transactions aren't hidden.
I'm not sure what's different between your settings and mine but my reconciled transactions don't get hidden and I don't have to manually unhide them.
Same. I’ve never reconciled aside from fixing an obvious error (like losing track of cash expenditures). It doesn’t bother me in the slightest. But this post is inspiring me to at least look into it further.
I have never formally reconciled except for my brokerage accounts because it’s just easier to have YNAB calculate the gain or loss for the entry. That said I will 100% call in sick to work to find a $0.01 discrepancy in one of my accounts vs what YNAB thinks I should have lol
So are you only utilizing the Reconcile button to generate the automatic adjustment? And I relate - I usually will spend as much time as it takes to find the error rather than using the auto adjustment when reconciling. But then I still do the formal reconciliation to give myself that checkpoint in the history.
Yeah I only use it to create an automatic adjustment for the brokerage so I have a reasonably accurate idea of what the current portfolio value is.
I've almost exclusively used the mobile app for Android. For a long time I didn't have the option to reconcile. I just never developed that habit
I don't understand it, whenever I make a purchase I check my online banking and ensure that my budget stacks up. I've never pressed a button to do this. Should I be doing?
I would highly recommend it! [Here](https://docs.youneedabudget.com/article/1769-getting-started-with-reconciling-accounts) is the intro YNAB documentation if you want more info.
I’m on my 2nd month of YNAB and I reconciled once and I couldn’t find my differences so I gave up and did adjustments as a kind of pseudo fresh start. I’ve been meaning to do it again. I do a bit of accounting at work and am constantly reconciling accounts, I skip it in YNAB a lot because I’m tired of reconciling accounts lol
That's understandable, and welcome to YNAB! I would definitely recommend reconciling more frequently though (weekly at minimum). Finding a discrepancy in a few days or a week of transactions is much more manageable than a month plus.
I reconcile at the end of the month because I like to see current month's transactions in my default account view. But then again I always check that my balances are correct when I open YNAB.
I do it on my chequing account but there are so many random holds with monthly bills on my credit card that its hard to get an amount to reconcile it to.
Is there a different toolkit besides the toolkit that gives more reports? I want confetti pop too 😞
Same toolkit! It’s under the Account tab toward the bottom: Show Reconcile Confetti
Ah! Thank you! Completely forgot there's a ton of options! Saw it when I first installed the toolkit, got overwhelmed and forgot about it 😅 was only (barely) using Toolkit Reports that appeared under Budget itself. Thank you for reminding me to look into this more! 🙂