Hacker News Reader

Comment by wredue | Hacker News Reader

Lots of budget software certainly doesn’t, and even when it does, directing the splits to the appropriate account is impossible.

You Need A Budget stands out as an amazingly useless piece of software that also, for some reason, comes highly recommended.

View on HN

What about it is useless?

I’ve found it to be incredibly useful. And prior to that I used ledger for a few years. Ledger was great, but personally I find YNAB to be more useful because the budgeting features are the focus, not the accounting.

Maybe I'm outside the norm, but as a YNAB user of over 10 years, I've never needed this. We split transactions across multiple categories all the time (shopping at Target for groceries, clothing, household goods, etc), but I expect that is very common.

I don't think YNAB philosophy would have you tracking reward or gift card balances, so you'd only track the amount that hit your CC, in this example. In that regard, YNAB certainly isn't a tool to track all of your monetary assets.

Is it common to split a single transaction across multiple accounts?

When I use cash I split the transaction like this (in YNAB):

    CASH         -$7
    LOOSE CHANGE +$0.36
    STORE        +$6.64

Loose change is an account that represents at least as much money as there is in change in my house, pockets, cars, etc while cash is an exact tracking account.

Have you found value out of this? I just consider cash spent as soon as I withdraw it, as far as the budget goes. Tracking small change sounds tedious and seems line it wouldn’t provide value, but so I’m curious to hear if you think differently.

I used to do this but I started tracking change separately because I want to track budget categories exactly but I also don’t want to have to count a bunch of change every time I reconcile my cash account. The change account is only tracked automatically, it would be too tedious to do manually.

I do the same as you. I used to attempt to track cash spending but I found that if I wasn't tracking it within 24 hours of it being spent, I probably wasn't categorizing it correctly anyway.

Since my cash expenditures represent well under 1% of my total spending, it wasn't worth tracking in detail.

I used to toss coins in the bin. Time spent accounting for then (Where are they now and how much is it, how much more do i need?) cost more time then their value. Now I live somewhere where some merchants only accept cash, so I save them again. It's a hassle though.

budget software ≠ accounting software

The entire purpose of a budget is to compare to your cumulative account postings on a period. If your accounting is garbage, then the budget will be similarly useless.

YNAB does support multi account split transactions, it’s just a combination of the split and transfer types. It’s not meant to support full accounting but it certainly supports that.

Sorry, but YNABs transfers are bordering on hostile to the user. Unless things have greatly changed very recently, then YNAB would double all my auto transfer postings (I auto transfer money biweekly/monthly to vehicle maintenance, property tax, annual insurance bills, discretionary, house maintenance and a few registered accounts like retirement, my kids education etc). YNABs process here proved to require constant reconciliation. Not only that, but further placing postings for capital gains would make it throw a tizzy.

YNAB is basically completely useless as far as anything beyond an extremely extremely rudimentary single user budget.

When you say “transfer money to discretionary” for example, is that a category in your budget or a separate account?

I’ve never had YNAB double up a transfer.

Also, capital gains - not sure what the issue is there either. Add a transaction and categorize it to “Ready To Assign”. Works great.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com