4 New Features in Your YNAB Budget

(Two of them Make Tax Time Easier!)

Here at YNAB, every six weeks we have what’s called “NORM” week. It’s short for “no recurring meetings” and yes, it’s as blissful as it sounds. It means one weeklong jubilee of virtually zero scheduled meetings and the whole company abides by it. So when given this free, peaceful week, one of our product teams went deep deep down into the hidey holes of YNAB code to do some spring cleaning.

And…yeah. They slayed. Here’s a few updates that will make your budget cleaner, your taxes easier, and your monthly budgeting check smooth like creamy peanut butter. Here’s what’s new:

Export a List of Specific Transactions

Filing taxes is SO fun (said no one, ever). It might be a little less terrible starting today, though, because now on the web version of your budget you can export a selection of transactions from YNAB into a handy CSV file—say all the ones in your small business category, work reimbursements, or tax-deductible giving. You know what will make your preferred account or tax preparation professional absolutely giddy? Sending them that crisp, clean .csv export. Please send us a video if you get their celebration dance recorded.

Click your budget name in the top left corner and you’ll see an option to “Export Budget” or “Export X Transactions” whenever you have multiple transactions selected.

Before this update, if you wanted to export expenses you had to export the entire novel in all of its glory in one epic .csv file. It wasn’t exactly pretty. And it wasn’t exactly what we wanted.

This ability to export specific transactions isn’t just for tax season either (which I really just view as Girl Scout cookie season. I typically get more excited for Tagalongs and Thin Mints kept in the freezer than a tax return. And I can’t be the only one). This new feature comes in handy on other occasions too—pulling a list of child-specific expenses to bring to court, pulling a list of maintenance expenses over the life of an automobile, or truing up shared expenses from a joint vacation with friends (are we dreaming about that one yet?!).

Assign Flag Tags in Bulk

For those that have mastered their flag game, your world is about to get a lot more efficient. You now have the ability to flag multiple transactions at once.

In the before times, you know this was a one-by-one slow and steady plodding. Now? Lightning fast.

Here’s what this might look like in action:

Let’s say you are trying to keep track of your car maintenance costs separately from your partner. They drive a blue Honda, you drive a green Subaru.

  • Search for any transaction at the Honda dealer and mark those blue.
  • Search for any transaction at the Subaru dealer and flag those green.

Now you have a nicely compiled list of your maintenance expenses by car. Want to get crazy? If you ever sell the car private party, now you can export the entire list of maintenance expenses for the prospective buyer.

Search Your Payees (on Web)

Is your list of payees something that would make Marie Kondo proud? It can be soon! We’ve added a search bar to the Manage Payees to quickly find and combine similar payees. This means you can clean up your payee list in record time for squeaky clean data reporting.

All those crazy numbers that get imported every time you Uber? Yep, you can change all the funkiness to one streamlined “Uber” payee. Same thing with your 3,215 Amazon payees.

Ready, set, spark joy!

Consolidate your list of payees with the new search bar in Manage Payees.

Approve All Your Transactions in One Click

When you’re approving your transactions that have just entered your budget from Direct Import, you used to have to click, click, click, click, click, click, click. Didn’t check your budget in a few days? Multiply those clicks by three. But now, you can now approve all new transactions at once with the “Approve All” option in the edit dropdown (web only).

Approve all transactions at once.

We’ve got plenty more budget updates in the hopper. We’re just getting started. Stay tuned for what’s up next (*Gasp!* mobile reconciliation for iOS?! Android users, hold tight…we haven’t forgotten about you, we promise!) or read the release notes to see what else we’ve been up to. Happy budgeting!

Related Articles
No items found.
4 New Features in Your YNAB Budget