Credit Card Payments Have Met Their Match

When you make a credit card payment, two transactions are imported: the money leaving your checking account and the payment posting to your credit card account. And connecting them used to be your job. YNAB needed a payee rule to link the two, and if you hadn't set one up yet, those transactions just sat there, waiting to be connected to their counterpart.

Now they can find their true match on their own! If the amounts line up within a few days and everything else we know about the two transactions agrees they belong together, we’ll link them for you. No rule required.

And that amount-matching solves a subtler headache, too. If you have two cards at the same bank, there's a good chance payments for both import under the same payee name. You know, something helpfully specific like AUTO PAYMENT THANK YOU. One payee name, two cards, and a rule that can only ever point at one of them. Now YNAB notices when a payee name is ambiguous, sets the rule aside, and matches by amount instead. The payment lands where the money actually went.