Hey, all! I know I’m not the only YNAB (You Need a Budget) user who’s also a Beeminder user. Daniel has given me the go-ahead to make this post as a way to collect suggestions for integrating Beeminder with the newly released YNAB API.
My own YNAB goals, all of which are currently manual, but which I’d love to turn automatic:
A do-more of reconciling my accounts X times per week
A reverse odometer (cumulative do-less that resets every month) for spending in my “lunch” category
A do-less of categories I have to WAM (move money from a different category to cover overspending) per reconciliation
A do-more to update my YNAB forum journal (I imagine this probably doesn’t connect to the app’s API, so it might have to stay manual)
I also have a do-less “delivery” goal that I update manually whenever I get takeout or delivery (and I’ve recently revised it to be triggered when I get lunch out or go out to eat in a restaurant as well), which could probably be automated as well, by triggering whenever there was a new transaction in my “delivery”, “lunch”, or “restaurant” categories, though I imagine that would probably be a bit more complex to set up.
What YNAB-Beeminder integrations would y’all like to have?
It’d be interesting to be able to have a goal to increase the Age of Money metric. Also, how about one for getting your To be Budgeted category to zero once a month? Or how about one for reaching a savings goal in a particular category?
Love YNAB, auto bank sync doesn’t work for Non-US users though and for various reasons I reverted to YNAB4.
My main goal was to make sure that I use the app to add spends, not-out-of-sight, not-out-of-mind and all that re:budget.
My current link with Beeminder is therefore pretty basic. I use Zapier to monitor one of the subfolders of the YNAB Dropbox which gets automatically ‘updated’ when you add a transaction via the App.
When I used to track spending (before YNAB), by far the most important metric was until when I would have to wait before I was allowed to spend money again per-envelope. The mobile spreadsheet featured that prominently.
As a side note, I got an email today saying that it’s open for everyone now. I think that’s actually been the case for a bit, but it’s super-super announced now
I’d love something like that, too. I was also thinking if it’s possible to write an integration myself using akrasia, but since @csu is not very active and the project itself seems to be on hiatus (even though my memrise goal still works…) I don’t know if it’s a good investment of time.
Are there any other beeminder inetgration frameworks like akrasia (I guess beemind.me is not something like that?)?
Ooh, I love YNAB! Even though it hasn’t been able to sync automatically with my bank for longer than I can remember.
I currently beemind (via a complice integration) inputting data to YNAB.
If there was a direct integration, I’d be tempted to start beeminding age of money and the size of some savings goals.
I especially like the sound of beeminding “do-less of categories I have to WAM (move money from a different category to cover overspending) per reconciliation,” though that might be tricky to implement! I find YNAB works really well for letting me have a better rough mental picture of how much money I have to spend (so I fairly successfully decide on-the-fly “I can find $20 for this” vs “I can find $200 for this”) but I still don’t tend to check YNAB before purchases, even large ones; anything that slapped my wrist for buying first and re-budgeting second would be really helpful.
YNAB4 user here! So no API love I’m afraid. I’m outside the US so moving to the online YNAB makes not that much sense for me. Also I’m not gonna spend $84 a year for a glorified spreadsheet with not much added functionality over YNAB4 which still does the job nicely for me.
Tiller can be a pretty good option. It uses Yodlee to inject data into Google Spreadsheets, and you can do envelope style stuff, like YNAB. You can definitely tie Google Spreadsheets and Beeminder together…
Just FYI, currently the YNAB API does not make this easy. I’ve written some code to calculate this for my own use, so if Beeminder ever gets to the point where it’s ready for such an integration, I’ll be happy to share my code.
Looks like there are a ton of preconfigured options! I chose to make a do-less for overspends, which will encourage me to wam ahead of time instead of after the fact. Let’s see how it goes!
I realise this thread is about YNAB integration so forgive this for being a little off-topic, but I looked at YNAB and ended up settling on using another expenses / personal finance app instead - Pocketsmith, and I wanted to mention it because it has a really excellent API, I find it more featureful than YNAB, and I have already written one integration for it.
So if you aren’t already too locked in to YNAB, it might be a decent option. Though there isn’t an existing direct Beeminder integration, the API probably supports whatever you wanted to do.
I had to retire the Zapier autogoal, because it wasn’t registering any overspends after the first one right after launching the goal. Anyone else having better luck?
There wasn’t any way to ask YNAB to pull from your accounts, so if you didn’t do that, the data was horribly stale. I ran them for maybe six months but it was a very bogus experience.
If they add an automatic data pull, or an API trigger for it, this would work nicely.
