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YNAB recommends the manual entry of purchases to better understand the relationship between the things you buy and your money. This has helped me be much less impulsive and more aware of the large money sinks in my life (lunch!). Whatever setup works for you to help you budget though, it is great software.

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Yep! I did that for awhile, and still do it quite often for purchases while I'm out and about at target, grocery stores, restaurants, bars, and coffee shops. But for me, importing dumps from my banks and going through each transaction to "accept" them is plenty enough for that mental jolt. The tedium of entering names, categories, and prices might be a bit more powerful, but just seeing every transaction is (for me) a 99% achievement of the same goal.

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