Release Notes

We updated a few hidden 🔍 mentions of “goals” within our tooltips to the latest and greatest “targets” language. Learn more about targets.

Surprise! It’s Thursday and we’re continuing prep for direct import for those of you across the pond. Whether you’re enjoying a few days off or working, we hope this weekend is a good one!

Today’s release brings us ever closer to some fun new features, including that sweet sweet UK direct import and a neat update to tracking accounts that you’ll hear about soon! We’re also slowly and steadily reducing the overall nubmer number of typos in the app 🎉

We’re fixing an issue in your subscription invoices that would prevent you from updating the recipient address when entering certain international zip codes. We’ve also fixed an error message that appears when you try to add a category group name that already exists. Under the hood, more work is being done to support UK & EU direct bank imports! 

In a previous release, we’d unintentionally introduced a “feature” that prevented you from moving reconciled transactions between accounts! 🙀That is now fixed in this release and you can once again move those transactions to your heart’s content.

We’re back with a mostly behind-the-scenes update. We’ve made some improvements to the first-time user experience and are continuing to zero in on bringing it to web. Work on bringing DI to budgeters in the UK is underway as well. In the meantime, happy last day of the month! Or, as we budgeters know it, the best day of the month. 😉

Keyboard aficionados rejoice! You can now clear and unclear transactions while editing them or creating them with the keyboard. (A note for Safari and Firefox users on macOS: make sure you’ve enabled the settings required for full keyboard navigation.)

I thought Tuesday’s release was low on note-able updates but today’s even more so. Nothing to see, but check out YNAB on your social media platform of choice for some top notch content from our virtual company retreat.

Not much to see today. We fixed a couple of bugs related to the super exciting invoice feature (and I mean that, invoices are a big deal ‘round these parts) we released last week. Everything else is behind the scenes, but if you need some more YNAB goodness in your life, check out our job posting for Seasonal Support Specialists!

Today’s release includes a new element to YNAB account management: you can now download your YNAB subscription invoices and modify the name & address that appears on them yourself. This should be helpful in particular to those of you using YNAB for small businesses and who need to expense your subscriptions. To find them, head to Account Settings (in the account dropdown) and you should see a new section titled Invoices right under Subscription.

Thwack! Today’s release includes a bug fix. Now, if you have the search box selected within your account register and navigate to the Budget, the app will no longer crash. We’re also tidying up the database, making updates so that we can more easily integrate Ember CLI and updating a little logic ahead of our next mobile releases.

The YNAB train is chugging along with another day of small fixes and tweaks. There’s some fun stuff coming up that we’re laying groundwork for and we’re very excited to share it with you when it’s ready!

We’ve got some small language tweaks today to continue our mission to bring you a clear, concise YNAB experience. Cheers!

No user-facing changes today! Just some improvements to our developer environments and processes.

We’ve updated a help link that appears when you’re reconciling your accounts to be more… well, helpful. The rest is all technical improvements that are way too complicated for me to describe!

It’s a quiet one today, folks. Mostly back-end work to support upcoming changes. So let me take this opportunity to say: we’re happy you’re here, and we’re excited about everything we have to share with you soon. Thanks for being a YNABer!

Today’s release is all about what you don’t (yet) see. We’ve made behind-the-scenes improvements and fixes that you’ll benefit from in the future if you have debt accounts or if you’d like to share YNAB with a group of people.  Ruby is also running on newer rails. Which is great if, like Ruby, you frequently travel by train. Or something like that…

In this release, we fixed an inconsistency with the “Underfunded” Auto-Assign button. It would behave differently from the other Auto-Assign buttons when no categories were selected. We took that button aside and explained the benefits of working together as a team. They promised to stay in line and behave from now on. Buttons these days… 🙄

Correction: I need to apologize for the mistake above. This fix is still in progress — not quite fixed yet. Stay tuned!

All manners of database-layer and other technical improvements in today’s release. A lot of it has to do with bank import improvements, some of it is removing code that is not used anymore, and I even saw the faintest hint of some groundwork for yet-to-be-released features.

In this release, we clarified the wording of the message we send when you delete your YNAB account to be more specific about how we handle the data associated with your account (we delete it, immediately). We also fixed an issue where, under unusual circumstances, duplicate subscriptions would be created unexpectedly. If you’re looking for more YNAB fun, check out this video on setting targets with our favorite whisk-wielding budget superhero Hannah. Also, please send whisk emojis.

Not much to see here, but we did fix 19 instances where we were still talking about “budgeting” rather than “assigning” dollars. Never fear, more exciting updates coming soon (but also, what’s more exciting than assigning dollars?? Nothing! Nothing, I say!).

So many PRs, so few user-facing elements to talk about today. Instead, let’s try this: have you heard we’re hiring our very first data scientist? Details here!

Another set of mostly background updates that set the stage for big improvements to come. If you can identify the unbelievably tiny visual glitch that we fixed in Manage Payees (as a result of a more noticeable window positioning-related bug fixed in today’s update), you get bragging rights for a year.

Today is behind-the-scenes with one small exception: the dividers within the Reports Inspector have been updated back to their intended styling!

Bug squashing continued! We fixed a goofy bug where the account register would “wobble” unexpectedly- one of those things you cannot unsee once you see it. 🙈 We also moved some buttons around in the Budget Categories dropdown for a more efficient use of space on smaller screens, and for those who use our Classic budget theme, we cleaned up a few missing borders from your transaction rows.

Welcome to your Thursday behind-the-scenes and bug squashing release. We’re paving the way to bring the learning-driven design of our mobile onboarding experience to web. We also fixed a few bugs… Setting up direct import in some accounts while in Dark Mode used to cause display issues. Not anymore! In rare situations, Ready to Assign would show the wrong amount in the mobile app. No longer! After editing an Assigned amount, ‘Undo’ could become unavailable when it shouldn’t be. Not now! We hope you enjoy your less-buggy budgeting experience. 🙂

Editing a repeating Needed for Spending target? Now you’ll see the correct upcoming date. Some groundwork was laid (lain?) that’ll help us better understand Direct Import success rates across contexts to (you guessed it) continue making import better for all. Also, we made a change to the multi-select checkbox: if you already have something selected and you click it, it’ll de-select rather than select all. Most of you have no idea what I’m talking about—to those that do, we got you!

If you haven’t checked out the updates from Tuesday’s web (and mobile!) releases, go do that now (this video is a great place to start). Don’t walk, run!! Today we’re releasing a few tweaks and polishes, including an update to how monthly totals are calculated in the right-hand sidebar and some copy changes to make for a more consistent and enjoyable budgeting experience. 

Today’s release brings your budget on the web in line with our newly refreshed mobile apps. A handful of key terminology changes means YNAB better meets new users’ expectations (and YNAB now incorporates language that we all actually use in real life! 💡). Plus, a redesign of the budget header and the detail panel to the right of your budget helps you give your dollars jobs with more easily accessible context. Want some humor with your app updates? Be sure to check out Hannah’s video on today’s web and mobile release details.

Today’s entire release is composed of improvements to how things operate in the background. Think of it as restructuring some of our internal code to make it easier for us to work with in the future, without changing the behaviour from the user point of view. 

Or as some would say:  “Bug fixes and performance improvements.”

Some minor touch ups in the code as we’re gearing up for a larger release in the upcoming days. We also fixed alignment issues in the header with the current month selectors.

How is it July 1st already?! Today brings an improved behavior of checkboxes within Manage Payees and throughout the app, and we also fixed a bug that could cause the tooltip shown when you hover over the number of days since you last reconciled to disappear unexpectedly.

The last release was so exciting, you should go read those release notes again. Today’s release is largely behind the scenes, just a few copy tweaks and fixes. See you on Thursday!

Brace yourself fellow YNABers, we’ve got a big one today. So big in fact that I am going to use bullet points, because what better way to ensure each of these enhancements gets their time in the sun? It’s like giving each one of them their own personal beach chair—can you tell I’ve been craving some time at the seashore? Anyways: 

• Ever wish you could import transactions all in one fell swoop from the All Accounts register? Now you can. Look for the new “Bank Import” button in the toolbar and import away! Also in the toolbar in all registers, not just All Accounts, you’ll notice that we’ve folded the Filter menu into the View menu. Same options, now all in one place. 
• Do you use File-Based Import? Do you know about File-Based Import? If the answer is no, it might be because previously it wasn’t that obvious that File-Based Import was even an option! No longer. In each account register you’ll now notice a “File Import” button that will get you started. We’ve also renamed the current “Import” button to “Bank Import” (if you haven’t yet set up Direct Import for that account it will appear as “Link Account”). 
• Balance adjustment transactions made from the Edit Account screen will now enter as cleared. Previously they entered as uncleared and that was confusing. No longer! We also edited some of the copy on that screen to clarify which balance it is that you’re actually adjusting. 
• YNAB will now automatically distribute any money leftover in a split transaction between the designated  categories. This semi-secret option has long been available in the mobile apps  and now you  can take advantage of it on the web as well.
• We’ve added Undo/Redo buttons to Manage Payees! Accidentally merge two payees that should be distinct? Never fear! You can now undo and redo to your heart’s content. We’ve also added a clear button to the search bar and a counter to show how many transactions will be impacted by a payee merge. Pro-tip: click that counter to see the full list of transactions as they appear in the register. 
• When entering a new transaction, should you choose a payee that is already associated with a particular category, we’ll scroll directly to that category in the designated popover so you can easily see its balance. Do I have enough money in my vacation category for this sweet beach trip? Yes, yes in fact I do. 
• We’ve improved the alerts, options, and behavior present when you attempt to save a transaction without a category assigned. We’ve also made some changes to the automatic category assignment logic to reduce the likelihood of inadvertently categorizing a transaction to a hidden category, which can wreak havoc on your budget.
• Last but certainly not least, we’ve made a few small copy changes to the Add Account screen and a variety of tooltips to improve clarity and utility. 
• Okay… truly last (and still not least), we have a few fixes as well: we fixed a couple incorrect colors and widths in the overspending message in classic mode and we sped up transaction fetching through the API. 

You made it to the end! That should definitely count toward your Goodreads annual reading challenge.

Moldovan YNABers rejoice—the Leu is now an available currency! For those of you just beginning your YNAB journey, confirming your email has a handy new confirmation message that tells you which email address you’ve confirmed. You know, in case you have all the YNAB accounts. 😉  And if your YNAB journey is (sadly) coming to an end, you can now delete your account on an iOS device. (But if iOS is your stomping ground, you likely won’t see this message… what do they say about a release note written with no one around to read it?) 

Nothing notable to report today, just some housekeeping to keep our code spic and span and enable better in-app embedded videos in the future!

As promised, more exciting release notes: you can now filter your Recent Moves! Check out just your budgeted amounts, how you’ve been moving money between categories to Roll with the Punches, or everything all together. New to Recent Moves? Check out this video to learn more (note, this video doesn’t actually include the new filters, go check those out in your budget)! 

Another small update that tweaks how the app is performing behind the scenes, with no visible changes to you! See you next week for more exciting release notes!

This release is mostly about cleaning up some loose threads in the background. We’ve also fixed a rather ugly typo: “balanace” just doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily as “balance”.

Routine background improvements releasing today, nothing to see here folks [yet!]. With such a quiet release today, why not use the time to nudge your accounting and payroll specialist friend to apply to our current job opening, instead?

The Reconcile button was looking a little long in the tooth (literally) after yesterday’s release. We took it to the dentist (figuratively).

It’s the start of the month, so make sure your accounts are reconciled, your previous month’s overspending has been covered and start assigning that money to the jobs you want them to perform!

On our side, we’re releasing a small fix to the “Manage Payees” window to make sure that we don’t accidentally save a modification to a renaming rule that you didn’t intend to do.

Wowza; this release contains 27,210 lines of code that is largely supporting our coming-soon overhaul of the YNAB first time user experience. We cannot wait to share it with all of you! In the meantime, Hannah shares some unique and creative ways to get even more out of the features you’ve already been using: 5 Ways to Level Up Your YNAB Budget. 

Today brings four small, albeit important bug fixes related to transaction entry. (1) Imported transactions that have been set to repeat on mobile would sometimes incorrectly match. That won’t happen anymore. (2) Previously, if you split a transaction and then later changed your mind and removed one of the splits, it’s possible the transaction would save with no category assigned. No longer! (3) Occasionally, an unnecessary scroll bar would appear in the account list while editing a transaction—took care of that one. (4) When adding a transfer transaction, sometimes the presented list of accounts would appear in an unexpected order. They will be consistent from now on!

This week’s release brings another set of back-end changes paving the way toward exciting new debt features. We’re also laying groundwork that will eventually make YNAB much easier to share with others. And we fixed a pesky bug that prevented transactions from auto-categorizing when imported via the API.

As roots of the tree,
Underlying libraries
Stronger in the wind.

Today’s release brings more improvements to the code running our app. It shouldn’t feel any different to you but for the knowledge that underneath the hood, the engine is running at peak performance.

In other news this week, iOS users should definitely check out the new reconciliation on iOS feature!

Not much to report today, but if you haven’t already, you should definitely check out the new versions of our mobile apps that started rolling out yesterday. Both Android and iOS are now equipped with Money Moves and the option to bulk edit transaction flags. iOS also got a slew of additional upgrades including the ability to change your account balance, edit account details, duplicate a transaction, and more!

May the fourth be with you! And also, the time since you last reconciled your accounts. You may have noticed this change arrive in your account registers last week under the “Reconcile” button. It’s a quick reminder to make sure your account balances  are up-to-date, spick-and-span,  ready-to-take-on-the-Sith… you get the idea. New to reconciliation and want to learn more? Check out this article from our Knowledge Base.

We’re behind the scenes with today’s release components. Fear not! Much is on the way…

Today’s release changes the default selection in Manage Payees: now, when you open Manage Payees with no transactions selected, no payees will be selected (which is probably what you expected it to do all along…).

A few weeks ago, we updated the Underfunded Quick Budget button so that clicking Underfunded now assigns all remaining dollars from To be Budgeted to categories in order of priority. Today’s release fixes a bug where Needed for Spending categories with a weekly target weren’t prioritizing correctly. We also improved the warning message that appears before deleting transactions in bulk just to make sure we’re all on the same page about what’s about to happen.

Today’s release brings an update to Alexa Skill that should improve Alexa’s recognition of your YNAB category and account names! Otherwise, we are heads down looking at your feedback on our newest features, hiring new team members, and setting the stage for the next set of awesome releases.

Nothing new this week, but if you want to level up your budgeting game, check out these YNAB hacks you might not know existed!

Small release today where we’re fixing an issue with the display of goals in the sidebar: we had inadvertently removed the message that indicates when you started that goal once you had fully funded it. It’s back now!

We’re also improving minor aspects of our recent feature releases such as the buttons for toggling the progress bars, and wording inside the money moves panel.

This release contains a lot of behind-the-scenes work spiffing up debt accounts. Some big changes are coming soon, and we can’t wait to share them with you! 

We also fixed a couple small things, like maintaining the ‘cleared’ state when duplicating transfers and ensuring $0.00 amounts are readable when categories are selected in the Classic theme.

It’s spring! The sun’s out, flowers are blooming, and your categories are looking snazzy. Progress Bars, which make it easier than ever to see what’s happening in your budget, are officially available to everyone. (Some of you fine YNABers have had this one for a while, but it’s now (finally!) released to all.  🙌 ) We also made a small visual tweak to pill colors that will make them a bit easier to read, especially for folks who don’t have the best vision. We hope you enjoy the view!

Ever wished you could duplicate your daily coffee or transit transaction for fast and easy entry? Now you can! Just select a transaction and choose the new “Duplicate” option in the Edit menu.

P.S. This is not an April Fools’ joke!

For those of you scratching your heads trying to remember where you moved money from last week (or last month…or yesterday…or an hour ago…), our new Money Moves feature signifies the dawn of a new era. More feature details over on the YNAB blog!

We’ve also built in some brains to the beloved Underfunded Quick Budget button. Clicking Underfunded will now assign all remaining dollars from To be Budgeted to categories in order of priority. As part of the update, a new button will appear in your Quick Budget options when it’s relevant: Reduce Overfunding.

Today’s release also brings more at-a-glance clarity to your Spending by Date goals on web: progress bars & their descriptions now take into account all spending since the goal was created, not just spending in the current month. If you’re on track with your Spending by Date goal and have done a little spending (hello, spring wardrobe!), you’ll now see those details to the right of your category name. 

In today’s release we fixed a bug that would make it impossible to delete certain payees under certain circumstances. It was frustrating, and it won’t happen anymore. In more exciting news, check out this sweet blog post recapping some of the cool features we released last week. 

Another behind-the-scenes release today—nothing to see here. Carry on!

Filing taxes is SO fun (said no one, ever). It might be a little less terrible starting today, though, because now you can export a selection of transactions from YNAB into a handy CSV file—the perfect thing to send to your preferred account or tax preparation professional! And even better, this export will include your scheduled transactions. Finally, for those of you that have a large number of payees, we have implemented an update that will speed up all facets of your payee management experience!

We’re still joyously keyboard-deep in champagne popping GIFs (we have a few fans of bulk-flagging around here), but we had one more (small) bulk editing tweak up our sleeves. If you’ve ever clicked the “select all” box while you had a partial selection going, everything was deselected. You may’ve thought, “Wait, this doesn’t follow the recommended checkbox behavior…” And you’d be right! We’ve corrected the “select all” box so it actually selects all when clicked, even when you have a partial selection going. To deselect all, simply click again. 

Prepare yourselves fellow YNABers; today’s release is hefty. Hefty new thing number one: rejoice, for you can now bulk edit flags. Hefty new thing number two: after importing new transactions into your register you’ll find a handy “Approve All” option in the edit menu. Selecting each individual transaction is no longer required! Finally, hefty new thing number three: Manage Payees is now equipped with a search bar. Finding your desired payee has never been easier.

Today, in an effort to improve  legibility, we bid farewell to italicized text in YNAB (bon voyage!) -. In addition, we’re introducing a small enhancement whereby we’ll use the name of your bank account as a default nickname when adding an account. That being said, you’re still welcome to change it to your heart’s desire.

Also, over the past week we’ve been rolling out a small change to the inspector that moves the goals section up to the top. We hope this change will bring more visibility to goals as you go about your day to day budgeting!

Some internal house cleaning today. Additionally, we’re fixing a minor visual glitch with scroll bars having a dark colour when they shouldn’t, as well as making an onboarding tooltip more helpful.

Tuesday’s release was a big one; today’s a bit less so (though no less mighty). We added support for Botswanan Pula, fixed the rendering of the Philippine Peso symbol (₱), and posted an in-app reminder that we no longer support Internet Explorer.

Have you been racking up hidden no-longer-needed categories, wishing there was an easy and safe way to delete them? We–ok, fine–I certainly have. The wait is over! Today’s update makes deleting a category with budgeting history a breeze, helping you quickly reassign all transactions and budgeted amounts to the category of your choice. Spread your re-organizational wings and simplify to your heart’s content. Also, rest assured, the option to hide a category isn’t going anywhere, we got you 😉. 

In other news, we fixed a bug where, in certain circumstances, our duplicate detection for file-based transaction imports would get confused and well, not detect duplicates. That was not good, and it won’t happen anymore.

Today’s release is all about the backend, baby! While there isn’t anything shiny and new to see right now, you can always take a peek at  what’s coming up next.

It’s a bug fixes and performance improvements type of Tuesday. The enter now option on scheduled transactions now works from either side of a transfer on mobile. Reconciling is faster if it’s been a while since your last reconciliation (so it’s a good day to get all caught up in your account registers). Finally, matching pending transfers with cleared counterparts is now certifiably bug-free.

Some bug-fixing today—like the one where, if you had a lot of budgeting history (and you do!), scrolling in the Net Worth report could cause header and background colors to slip.

As for the rest of the release, like an oil change that you can’t actually see when you drive your car but can feel when you drive it, we’re cleaning up and optimizing, and hope your budgeting experience in 2021 has been cruising along.

Today’s release  supports a small experiment we’re running that we hope improves the process of connecting a new YNABer’s first account with Direct Import. It also has a few technical improvements (hello TypeScript upgrade, if you’re into TypeScript upgrades) and bug-fixes.

Small fix to have Direct Import transactions importing quicker, for some YNABers, after a recent change from our provider.

Today’s release fixes a couple of tricky visual bugs with goals and updates the summary display for accounts without transactions.

Today we released a few visual improvements to the Add Account flow, in addition to more backend changes to support upcoming features. Can you believe it’s February already? Cheers to a new month of budgeting!

Today’s release fixes some display issues you may have had if you’re using dark mode on Chrome 88. Or if, like me, you didn’t realize Chrome 88 was a thing, this will serve as your friendly reminder to update. Rest assured, dark mode should work just fine.

We’ve made some in-app copy more friendly and clear. Call us idealists—we like to think the whole budgeting experience can be fun and easy, even those rare occasions when you  hit a maintenance page. Otherwise, the slew of January’s ‘behind-the-scenes’ changes continue!

Today we’re cleaning up some old code, and introducing the foundations for features to come. And while you won’t feel or see any of them quite yet, they sound the promise of more exciting and delightful times ahead!

Today, we’re updating the way we display a pending transfer between a linked and an unlinked account in your budget. Unlinked accounts generally do not show pending transactions, but they can appear when a pending transfer comes from a linked account. This change makes sure that you only see the clock icon on linked accounts, and that unlinked ones behave as they should do!

In today’s release we fixed a bug that would occasionally result in duplicate transfer transactions (not fun).  We also cleaned up some out-of-date copy related to updating direct import connections and a misleading report filter option.

Today, we’re making it easier for you to close a tracking account on the web. Previously, if the tracking account was carrying a balance and you tried to close it, we would require you to make a transfer of the balance. Now, we’ll automatically close the account and adjust the balance to 0 for you. Happy budgeting!

We fixed an issue in the account settings when the dark theme is enabled and some small fixes to some behind the scenes stuff previously mentioned.

Today’s release contains more behind the scenes changes. A bit of tidying up after the New Year!

Today’s release contains behind the scenes changes. A bit of tidying up before the New Year!

OAuth is here! We started migrating the first set of direct import connections late last month and look forward to many more financial institutions making the switch soon.

What’s OAuth, you ask? It’s an “open-standard authorization framework”—basically, a widely accepted method for giving one entity (in this case, YNAB via our direct import partners) access to a specific set of data from another entity (in this case, your transaction information from your financial institution).

What does this mean in YNAB? Let’s say you’re creating a connection to “YourBank” and YourBank supports OAuth. As a part of the process, you will enter credentials and authorize this connection directly with YourBank. We expect OAuth powered connections will be more stable and require fewer re-authorizations, which means more time for good ‘ole budgeting!

Here at YNAB, December isn’t quite its own month. It’s kind of an Almost-January. Sort of a Pre-January—because January is when new budgeters and old-hand budgeters alike tend to experience a renewed enthusiasm, and we want to be perfectly ready for you all. So you’ll see a fair share of “behind the scenes improvements” over the coming weeks.

One small bug fix today to go with the backgrounders: When (and if!) you ever had a transfer from a cash account, and you then reconciled that transfer in the cash account, then you reconciled the other side of that transfer, we were mistakenly setting the cash side (where you started) back to cleared instead of reconciled. That won’t happen anymore!

Another small release today—just a  few behind-the-scenes changes to help us more quickly identify certain direct import issues. We also cleaned up a confusing message that some users were seeing after being directed to authenticate their direct import connection at their financial institution.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been rolling out some design and flow changes to the part of the app where you add and link direct import accounts. These changes will only affect some users, so you may not see anything new. Happy Thursday!

Small release including some changes that will help as we roll out Direct Import OAuth for more users.

Small release today, to help users that have not updated their mobile app to the latest version with issues that could appear configuring their direct import.

We’re hard at work on some big DI improvements, and this release continues the push toward getting them in your hands. You’ll be happy to know that when you do see these changes, any pending transfers that show up in your budget will be excellent at communicating with their pending-transfer-counterpart in the other account. What does that actually mean? Just that transfers should behave as expected, on both sides. 

We’re also reversing the change we made to category deletion on November 12th—you will be able to delete categories that have budgeting again. Before you get too excited, these types of category deletions can still lead to unexpected or surprising results. So why the change? We weren’t satisfied with our original solution and we’re going to keep working towards a better way to handle this pesky scenario. In the meantime, thank you to all the YNABers who shared feedback with us about this change—we’re grateful for your input! 

Speaking of gratitude (sentiment alert!), if you’re reading this release note it means you care about YNAB, at least a little. I know I speak for all of us at YNAB when I say we’re happy you’re part of our community. Wherever you are on your budgeting journey, whether you’re celebrating Thanksgiving in the US this week or not, thank you for being a YNABer!

Just some small quality of life changes today: we’ve improved the message that displays when you remove an OAuth bank connection and made a small tweak to the numbers shown in the inspector when you select multiple categories.

This release contains a fix to an annoying bug that would sometimes prevent you from selecting a payee (for example after creating a new category from within the transaction). Hopefully, you’ve never encountered it, but if you have: rest assured it’s gone for good.

In today’s release we’re introducing a change to category deletion. Previously, all categories were deletable under all circumstances, but deleting a category with budgeting history could cause unexpected or surprising results. We now prevent such category deletions. Categories can always be hidden, and for those who want to channel their inner Strong Bad, categories can still be deleted once all budgeted dollars and transactions have been moved elsewhere.

Previously, users of the YNAB API were unable to add splits to imported transactions. No longer! Split to your heart’s content. This release also includes a fix for a very uncommon issue involving converting a non-transfer transaction into a transfer transaction on two different devices at the same time (say that three times fast). Previously, this could cause your budget to be out of sync with itself, which was a bummer. Now, smooth sailing. Budgets ahoy!

More background changes in today’s release. Rest assured, YNAB is getting better and more secure for all YNABers.

Today’s release includes work on opposite ends of the spectrum: from deep in the codebase we’re making updates to support future features. At the same time, it’s never too late for a little design polish. If you’ve been dreaming of a small but pleasing update to the header buttons when adding accounts, today’s your day!

We love a good transfer from checking to savings after an unexpected windfall, or vice versa when it comes time to buy that sweet new slow cooker you’ve been saving up for. Today, we’re releasing a few small fixes to transfers in YNAB. In some rare cases, you may have noticed an “orphaned” transfer transaction in one account missing its corresponding buddy transaction in the other account. With this fix, you can confidently delete that orphaned transaction without concern, and the issue shouldn’t happen again. Rejoice!

You’ve probably noticed a lot of releases last week and this week. It’s been a little noisy—but we’ve been focused on quite a few small “behind the scenes” updates to keep YNAB speedy and secure recently, and most of those have needed to go out the door one at a time. More to come on that front! We’re also continuing to set the stage, code-wise, for some exciting new features (check out Up Next for more)!

Today’s release contains important code updates to support features to come! Stay tuned for an update to Up Next. We also fixed a visual glitch in reports and added some design polish to account creation in the mobile apps.

If YNAB were a restaurant, most of today’s changes would be happening in the kitchen—you wouldn’t see them, but your food would definitely taste better. A few small design tweaks were seasoned into the Quick Budget part of the inspector, enhancements that will improve some bank connections are thawing in the fridge, we finished frosting some new transactional emails, and we fried up a change that’ll aid our support team if you ever have to send in mobile diagnostics (which we hope you don’t). (Disclaimer: on the scale of ‘things not to do while hungry’, writing release notes falls between grocery shopping and watching online cooking tutorials. Bon appétit!)

In today’s release, we’ve fixed a split transaction issue that would appear in a (really) rare case. Imagine you were managing some payees. Now let’s say you’re working with a payee inside a split transaction, if you had a scheduled split transaction with that payee, and then you tried to view the associated transactions from the Manage Payee window (we told you it was rare!)… then the app would crash! Anyway, that’s fixed now, so rest assured that you won’t be falling down that rabbit hole.

On a brighter side, we’ve also made some small design tweaks to the inspector panel to improve the legibility of the app.

A few months ago, we introduced section headers, which make it easy to show or hide your scheduled transactions. In the spirit of simplicity, we’ve removed the checkbox in the filter menu that accomplished the same task.

The inspector (the section on the right hand side of the web app) got a design refresh this week. The updated colors, spacing, and typography should all make it easier for you to see the details of your budget categories, in all of their detailed glory! 

Ever seen $0.00 To be Budgeted at the top of your budget with a red background color (warning! bad! attention!)? Well, most everyone has not. But, some of you have, and the reason is because of rounding issues in budget calculations. This can happen when changing the currency format on a budget or if you have a Linked account with a bank that tracks transactions to a very, very tiny amount (442.345). We’ve made some improvements in this area that should fix these rough rounding issues.

Also, consider your split transactions officially freshened up, after today’s release. Specifically, we made a few visual improvements in the add and remove split buttons. Now if only we could do the splits…

You won’t see changes in the app directly after today’s release. We’re shipping code updates and setting the stage for new features to come. Pay no attention to that person behind the curtain!

Good morning! Today we’re doubling down on those pesky transaction selections that would persist in unwanted cases. In the last release, we fixed the case where you would navigate away and back to your account. Today we’re addressing hidden checked transitions 🕵️‍♀️. In certain situations, you could have transactions that remained checked even if you couldn’t see them because of a filter or a search. We’ve fixed that to make sure you don’t accidentally bulk edit any transactions you didn’t intend to!

We’ve also upgraded Ember, the framework powering our front-end, to a newer – and greater-  version.

In today’s release, we fixed a bug related to the selection of transactions in your accounts. Those of you with scrupulous attention to detail will have noticed that when switching from one account to another, you would have to manually deselect any previously selected transactions. This could become a problem because, in plain language, it was possible to have transactions selected that you didn’t know were selected, as they were filtered out of view. That could lead to all sorts of unexpected behavior! We now automatically clear your selection when you navigate away from (and back to) an account. Bug begone!

My little cheat sheet for today’s release says “no notable changes”. Yes, things like upgrading to TypeScript 4 are notable from a developer’s perspective (take note, developer-budgeters out there)—but it won’t be noticeable next time you pop open your budget. In other words, it’s all under the hood today, carry on.

We never want to make too much of where this button is or that button is, but here goes, because it can actually be a real thing: We’ve continued to simplify the design of the account widget, what we oh-so-lovingly call the part of the app where you add accounts (really, we love it, but it hadn’t gotten as much attention as, say, the sidebar recently). Our goal is to make the account widget more helpful, readable, and easier to navigate. Today we’ve tried to do all three by moving the back and cancel buttons to the top, improving readability, navigability, and opening up the bottom real estate for the aforementioned helpfulness.

Now, a lot of other things happened since last week—from bug fixes related with To Be Budgeted in the first-time user experience and in subscription management, to some API formatting clean-up and more clean-up around the logic underlying Quick Budget. But for the details, let’s just say: “Bug fixes and background improvements.”

Oh, hey there. We’re back to talk about some fixes that we just shipped out in YNAB today. Here’s what we have for you:

We made some design improvements to the linked/unlinked account selection screen so UI (User Interface) details are more consistent across the whole app. The icon style is more reflective of what you see in the app today. The purple information link in the “after” image is also more consistent with what you would see in other areas, so it stands out when you need a bit of assistance.

Sometimes, in ever-so-pretty-rare scenarios, deleting a subcategory would not work (that’s a bummer). It would just stay there and not be removed after clicking “Delete”. Fixed!

Oh, hello. Thanks for dropping by to check out some of the fixes that we just shipped out in YNAB today. Here’s what we have for you:

When showing errors for direct import issues, sometimes the bank/institution names were adding some weird characters in the name. For example, “Oliver’s Super Fancy Bank” was showing up as “Olivers Super Fancy Bank” and that’s probably not the best name for a bank…though it still is fancy, I guess. So, we fixed this issue, so that these weird characters won’t show up anymore.

In most browsers, you have the ability to expand text areas (i.e. the Account Notes section in YNAB) both horizontally and vertically. But, when you expand the text area horizontally in YNAB, it can “break” the layout as the text area can flow into other areas of the screen.

While we want you to be able to write all of the text in the world (if you want) we don’t want you to have to choose between writing a lot of text and breaking the layout. So, we have disallowed horizontal expansion of text areas, BUT we still allow vertical expansion, which will allow you to write EVERYTHING without breaking the layout.

• We fixed an issue when managing payees, where if you deleted a payee, we’d scroll you back to the top of the list of payees, and you lost your place. Don’t worry, after today’s release, we’ll now stay put, so you can keep on managing payees.
• During File Based Import (AKA the lesser known FBI acronym) we were combining transactions into one account (even in scenarios where they should be placed into multiple accounts) if your account identifiers had the same last 4 digits. Who knew bank accounts could have the same last 4 digits? What are the odds? Turns out…high enough to warrant a fix! So, we are now using the full account identifier, so you should not run into this problem anymore.
• At certain browser heights, the help beacon in the bottom righthand corner of the app covered numbers in the Income vs. Expense Report. Hey, help beacon…not very helpful! We’ve added a bit of extra space to the bottom of that report to ensure that all of the numbers are unobscured and easy to read.

If you’re like me, sometimes you’ll find yourself scrolling through your transactions in a few different accounts to see if you bought something on your credit card or if it was from your checking account. But when you go back and forth between accounts, you have to “re-scroll” to the place you were before. What a pain!…but wait…today, the 13th of August, marks the last time you’ll ever have to “re-scroll,” because YNAB will now remember your “scroll position” in the last account you were on. I guess you could say that we know how to “scroll” with the punches…oh boy.

API News

Good morning! We’ve pushed out a handful of infrastructural changes throughout different areas of the app, but, for now, we’ll just mention that a new POST /budgets/{budget_id}/accounts endpoint has been added to the API which allows the creation of an unlinked account.

Today we’re releasing some improvements to managing Accounts. Along with some design improvements when selecting and confirming a financial institution’s account to link a YNAB account to, we’ve also improved the messaging when connections get out of sync. This should improve clarity! Also, we used to auto-capitalize words when you entered an account name but we will no longer do this because it didn’t always work like it should and most folks would prefer to control their own capitalization.

Today’s release has quite a few under the hood changes and a fix for something you may or may not have encountered before. Sometimes when clicking a Quick Budget button soon after clicking another one, nothing would happen. This should now be fixed.

Also, we have upgraded the YNAB database to a more powerful server. We are observing better performance in the metrics we track and hope you will notice a difference as well!

Who doesn’t love a two-for-one? A BOGO (buy one, get one free)? Two-in-one conditioner/shampoo? Getting something extra is always a good thing…except for when it’s not. In today’s release we fixed an issue that would happen when hitting Enter on the “Add another split” button for Split Transactions that would cause two new rows to be created instead of one. Row plus, anyone? No thanks. Maybe we thought you loved splitting transactions so much that you just wanted to add even more? Either way, it’s fixed!

Let’s get directly to the point of today’s release…which, directly speaking, has a lot to do with Direct Import (connecting YNAB to your bank to import transactions). We have made a ton of different improvements to our Direct Import flow over the past few months, but we were being a little indirect with our language…kind of like what I’m doing right here.

With today’s released, we’ve cleared up the wording dealing with “delayed” connections to better communicate what is happening during the connection process. We’ve also taken a more direct approach to not allow linked “Cash” accounts…because linking to “cash” is not really a thing that is possible…because no one (that we know of) has credentials that we could use to link to your sock drawer or under your mattress.

Lots of good stuff-a-brewin’ in today’s release…but with any kind of brew, sometimes the sum of the ingredients is what stands out more than any one spice or flavor. That being said, a lot of the “ingredients” we pushed out today are less like cilantro (loud and overbearing…and why?) and more like a bay leaf…like, you don’t even know it’s in there until you’re trying to enjoy some spaghetti and then, all-of-a-sudden, you’re biting into a dry leaf…but in this release’s case, this is a good thing, believe me.

We made a few behind-the-scenes fixes today, and one in-front-of-the-scenes fix:

• Fixed some problems, including a crash, that could happen after creating a goal in a future month.

Good morning! We’ve got a few YNAB fixes and improvements coming in hot with today’s release:

• Links from our Help tool (blue “?” icon in the bottom right corner) were not working properly in Safari, but now they are!
• We’ve disabled browser autocomplete recommendations on inputs that already have dropdown lists.
• In some cases when you cancelled your request to sign on with Apple, you would get an unfriendly error instead of being taken back to where you were. We fixed that.

This release fixes a couple of small issues preventing some users from syncing changes from our mobile (iOS / Android) apps. Don’t know about our mobile apps? Learn more.

For today’s release, we’re continuing to make improvements to the Direct Import process by adding more helpful messaging and alerts and really tightening up the flow there. 

Along with those Direct Import improvements, we also made a fix to the new goals that we added a few months ago. The Needed for Spending: Weekly goal had a bug where if you selected “Every Friday” or “Every Saturday” due specifically in December 2020, the goal was prompting users to budget for 5 weeks rather than 4. All fixed now!

API News

“Continue with Apple” was not working as it should when authorizing one of our API Applications. Once you logged in with Apple we were not properly returning you back to the screen to authorize the app. Now we will!

Earlier this year, we pushed out a release that was the culmination of several months of work for a team here at YNAB that works on Direct Import (AKA the ability for YNAB to connect to your bank and magically pull in transactions). We switched Direct Import providers to a company called Plaid  (a provider that connects many popular financial apps to banks) with the overall goal of making your connection to YNAB more stable. 

In today’s release, we pushed out a bunch of back-end fixes to make your bank connection (via Plaid) more stable and reliable! Also with today’s release:

• When hovering over your available balance on a category with a goal, we show something called a “tooltip” to give you some helpful information. Well, we were not showing a tooltip for Needed for Spending (By Date) goals that have a repeat scheduled. Now we do!

• When removing a split , we were not updating the “Amount remaining to assign” totals right away but now we do.
• We corrected a minor issue with goals behaving inconsistently when created in future months.

Happy week after the 4th of July! We released a big (BIG!) revision to goals a couple of weeks back. Well, we uncovered a few issues as you all got in and got your goals on. Like where, in some rare cases, future goals could tell you to budget the wrong amount in the current month, which is especially not helpful. In today’s release, we fixed a few other issues to go alongside our extensive goals fixes:

• As some of you are aware, we use Ember for our front-end JavaScript framework for YNAB. In this release, we’ve upgraded Ember to version 3.9 which contains various security fixes, reduces file size and improves the performance roughly by 6% on the Budget and by 32% on the Register. Those are performance updates that will make YNAB smoother and faster!
• We fixed a bug that was making it so that users weren’t able to set goals during the getting started steps in YNAB.
• We fixed an issue where users weren’t able to close the Budget calendar picker. SIDE NOTE: Being constantly reminded that the date won’t go away is the most 2020 thing ever.
• And, as always, some under the hood work where we don’t need to bother you all with the details.

API News

• The API now allows split transactions to be categorized to the Inflow: To be Budgeted category

This morning we’re dropping (like it’s hot…which it is, because it’s Summer) a veritable plethora of layout fixes to make your life better. Have a gander (not the bird, but the “look at a thing” version of that word):

• We fixed an issue where you couldn’t scroll all the way to the right on the Income v Expense report to see your totals…which, hey…if not seeing your expenses made them actually go away, how cool would that be? Turns out, that’s not the case.
• We fixed an issue where, if you had a really long category name, the inspector would get cut off. I can’t be the only one who has an “Emergency Fun Socks Only For Extreme Emergencies” category.
• We also fixed a few display issues when resizing your browser to smaller sizes.

Oh, hey. Nothing to see here. But maybe instead of seeing it, you just feel this update as it involved a lot of behind-the-scenes polish…which, can I just give a shout out to proper nouns right now? Because it was behind-the-scenes polish, and maybe not behind-the-scenes Polish. Although, that would be cool too as Poland is a pretty rad country.

Should we deploy on a Friday two weeks in a row? No. Did we deploy on a Friday two weeks in a row? Yes. We needed to fix some subtle goal issues so you can happily budget over the weekend!

In today’s release, we focused on the inner beauty of the YNAB app and thought we didn’t have much to report, until we remembered the incredibly noteworthy update to all things goals last week and we FORGOT TO TALK ABOUT IT! So, let’s talk about it.

You’ve heard of #lifegoals and maybe even #squadgoals, but what about #goalgoals?! Last week, YNAB fulfilled everyone’s #goalgoals by taking goals in YNAB to the next level. When setting goals in YNAB you’ll now have quite a few more options to help you accomplish all of your #moneygoals.

Of particular sparkly-ness:

• You can now set a target day of the month for Monthly goals.
• You can set Weekly goals and specify by day.
• You can repeat goals every “n” months/years. And “n” in this case stands for number..I think…or maybe just months that start with “n”…November? Napril? Hmm….

Read more about the updates to goals.

You know sometimes when you’re tapping out a text and you’re trying to write “Brian” and it auto-corrects to “Brain”—and then you backspace and type out “Brian” again and it auto-corrects to “Brain”? And then you do it all a third time and throw your phone out the window because, well, just because?

We were doing something kinda like that if you imported a file with memos, undid it, and then tried to import it again. We would autocorrect to use the previous memos. Now, when importing, you get a clean slate. No more Brian>Brain swaparooski.

Also, we heard quarantine was sending people into a home improvement tizzy and we caught the bug and gave the account setup screen a little interior redesign. When you have no accounts in your budget (ha! Remember that precious moment?), you see a cute little piggy traipsing along with a bank instead of a scrawly not-on-brand-anymore treasure hunt map.

Before:

After:

And one last update to wrap up our productive set:
If you usually operate in USD, and then you opened up your budget and saw 35.43$ you might cringe a little, right? Well, we were doing that to the good people of Poland and a kind Pole informed us that their currency doesn’t look quite right without a space before the currency symbol, so we fixed that:

In other wonderful news, we’ll leave you with this: the official currency of Poland is called “the zloty.”

Should we deploy on a Friday? No. Did we deploy on a Friday? Yes. We didn’t want a display issue with our referral program link in Safari lingering around all weekend.

Update: We pushed out a second release today fixing an issue with Safari where items in the sidebar were not practicing social distancing and getting scrunched up.

In today’s release, we fixed a bug where the tops and bottoms of some letters and emojis in your category names were getting cut off. We wanted to let you know that this was a bug and not a time paradox scenario where the emojis were getting cut off because you had traveled back in time and messed something up where your parents didn’t fall in love, thus making it so that your “Internet School” emoji was getting cut off…”erased from existence!”

If you’re like me, you’re always looking out for those kinds of scenarios and checking past weather events for lightning storms just in case you need to generate the 1.21 gigawatts needed to make the flux capacitor work to time travel back to the present, should you find yourself stranded in the past. To be clear, this is not one of those situations.

Apropos of nothing everything, I just wanted to say that Atomic Habits, a book by James Clear, kind of rules. And by “kind of rules” I mean it’s inspiring and I love it and want to marry it. In Atomic Habits, Mr. Clear shares the story of the hapless British Cycling team that had been a joke in the cycling world (deemed to have suffered from “100 years of mediocrity”…ouch) until they hired Dave Brailsford as their Performance Director.

Brailsford was relentless in finding small areas where the team could make incremental 1% changes. The team redesigned bike seats, tested and improved racing suit fabrics and rubbed alcohol on the bike handlebars…seemingly trivial stuff in the overall scheme of things. But the “aggregation of these marginal gains” eventually led to huge improvements where, in the 2008 Olympics, the British Cycling team won “60% of all medals available.” Blimey!…might be a thing they remarked about the results?

Speaking of “marginal gains,” in today’s release we:

• Fixed the literal margins (spacing) and the hover state of transaction flags.
• Did some work on the details of the deselect checkboxes for categories and subcategories (tightening the margins and what not…you know…the digital equivalent of putting alcohol on the bike handlebars).
• Added a link to the documentation as to why your credit card payment category is red. Maybe not “your” credit card payment category, but if it is “your” credit card payment category, we want you to know why.

In today’s release, we fixed the vertical centering on the buttons throughout the app…we’re prefectionists perfectioniss perfectionists:

Some of you are going to read this and say, “buttons? That’s not a big deal!” And hey, I get it. It’s a nice, little bit of polish…and we love you for doing this, Kyle…but I want to be super clear that we just pushed out a ton of other changes as well. You’ll see them soon. I guess we could say that these features are “pending?”

Release #2 on June 11, 2020:

We identified and fixed a performance issue when importing direct transactions that caused our database to do more work than needed.

Today’s release contains some infrastructural changes and some behind-the-scenes optimization and bug-fixing…which, when you think about bug-fixing…if you fix a bug, does that mean it’s still there, but it’s just fixed? Like, if I fix a leaky faucet, the faucet is still there, but the leak is gone….but bugs? I don’t know if we want to just fix them. We probably need to eliminate them. I’ll discuss this with the team and make sure the bugs aren’t still there, even after they’re fixed. I hope that doesn’t weird anyone out to think that there are possibly fixed bugs running around in YNAB.

We really do put a ton of effort and resources into making sure that you can connect with your bank and give dollars jobs like it was…your job. We recently switched direct import providers (i.e. the service we use to connect YNAB to your bank to pull in transactions) and we hope and anticipate this will be a big improvement. However, there is no perfect way to have direct import work perfectly all the time, just like there is no perfect way to perfectly use the word “perfectly” perfectly multiple times in a sentence. So, in today’s release, we shipped an improvement to how we let you know about connections that don’t go…perfectly.

We’re now showing a “delayed” status for accounts / connections that go for some time without refreshing successfully. This can happen if the institution is having temporary issues or delaying our attempts to refresh the connection, or if it gets stuck somewhere in the process. The good news is that it usually fixes itself after a bit, but it serves as an alert to let you know things aren’t as good as they should be, and that the issues should be resolved momentarily. If you see a “delayed” status, we recommend waiting a couple of days before contacting Support. Read more about delayed connections.

Today’s release is chock-full (which…I always thought was either “chocked full” or “chalked full”) of all sorts of YNAB-y goodness. But before I get into that, I should probably let you know about my hypothesis on where “chock-full” comes from. I spent the last minute Googling it and I’m like 99% sure a “chock” was maybe like a place in a ship. So, one day, a boat captain was pulling into port and the longshoreman person was like “aye, how much wheat do you have in there, guv’na” and the captain turns to the person in a moment of brilliance and says “aye, the boat ‘tis chock-full.” 

Speaking of boats…look what we’ve shipped today!

• Avast! A various assortment of Budget table and Edit menu fixes:
  • If you manually added spaces to your category names they will now appear in the budget table like they used to… maybe you’re now trying to socially distance the letters in your category names?
  • The budget table will now adjust column sizes to fit better on smaller and larger screens.
  • If you have a lot of categories, the Edit > Categorize menu used to adjust too much causing it to run off the top of the screen. Now it won’t go farther than the top of the screen…what was even up there? Probably Murder Hornets, right? I don’t want to find out.
  • We fixed the colors on our “Try managing your budget with your Android” banner when using the web app while on a mobile device.
• The Budget toolbar is now located within the Budget table to give more room to the Budget inspector. Am I the only one who is picturing like a detective sitting at a diner table messing around with tools (probably a magnifying glass) trying to figure out where a certain charge is from?
• We fixed some display issues with the Accounts toolbar while on smaller screens.
• For consistency’s sake, we’ve made sure all instances where we mentioned “recurring transactions” will now say “repeating transactions.” No one will ever mention the word “recurring” ever again. We’re now on team “repeating.” I’ll prove this to you now: We’re now on team “repeating.”
• The content links on our dashboard pointed to somewhat outdated content. We’ve updated those links and prioritized the list slightly differently.
• Lastly, just for good measure: we’re now on team “repeating.”

UPDATE: After the above release on June 2nd, we made another release:

• If you tried to go directly to a bookmarked budget, but were logged in as someone else that didn’t have acccess to that budget, YNAB would give you an error message and tell you to reload, which give you the same error and ask you to reload… Not helpful! We’ve now fixed this.

Oh, the last release of May…it’s almost the end of Spring…which reminds me…have you done your Spring cleaning yet? Or maybe that is all anyone does these days since we’re all at home in this weirdo-with-a-beardo year of 2020. Either way, you may want to look at all of your bank accounts and do some Spring cleaning (AKA simplifying) for your financial life. We made a handy dandy guide on how to make that happen.

Speaking of simplifying: if you haven’t simplified your bank account situation, you may not have noticed this tiny little bug that we introduced. We recently updated some menus and with that update, we prevented the option to move transactions between accounts from becoming enabled if you had only two accounts. But today’s release fixed that issue. Sorry about that, my fellow simplifiers.

Also in today’s release: we’ve made it easier to click/check budget table rows by increasing the area needed to check a category row. This extra space is so luxurious.

Today’s release features a little bit of sunshine, a little dapple of rainbows and a whole lot of…behind-the-scenes changes. I saw a few mentions of args and like, an Object or maybe a function or something. The net result for you is that YNAB is stable as a table.