Bill keeping software? What is the best one now?

wonderpug · Post by **wonderpug** » Wed Jan 22, 2014 1:10 pm

Carpet_pissr wrote:One thing I need to figure out is how to deal with my wildly varying commissions, which are a major part of my pay (50%+ averaged out yearly). That can really throw a wrench into things, as I can go months without any commission (or very little), then I get a huge lump sum all in one paycheck.

I would think the YNAB system would be perfect for that type of unpredictable income. Before your big lump sum comes, you really can't count on it for anything... since you don't have it. So when your base income comes in, you give those dollars jobs and figure out how to make do with just that. When a huge lump sum comes in, you can then give it jobs for the next few months. "Whew, I'm all set for groceries, gasoline, and my phone bill until April." Now even though your bank account shows a glorious total that makes you want to go on a shopping spree, YNAB tells you that you in fact only have $100 to spend on fun stuff since the rest in your account is already assigned other tasks.

hepcat wrote:I downloaded and installed the trial last night. I need to spend some time with the help manual though as I'm confused as to how they handled reimbursements. I put in my work cell bill and then tried to follow their instructions for creating a reimbursement for it, but it just kept adding the value to my budget.

I'm not certain I understand you, but here's the two ways I handle work expenses I expect to be paid back for.

If it's a small amount, like $100 or less, I put the expense toward my work category that has $0 budgeted. This puts me in the red for that category, and for me that's a reminder that I need to be paid back for it. When my work reimburses me, instead of putting it as income for the month I put it toward the work category again as a negative value. Work budget gets out of the red and back to $0, and all is right in the world.

If it's a bigger amount, like a business trip that ran up my credit card over a thousand bucks, I feel the need to be sure I don't think I have money I don't have. I budget the $1000 toward my work category, it gets docked from my available funds, and then live life like that $1000 is completely missing. When the reimbursement comes in, I leave it as income for the month and treat it like normal inflow.

hepcat · Post by **hepcat** » Wed Jan 22, 2014 1:17 pm

I think I'm just having trouble shifting paradigms from a passive budgeting system like Mint to a more active one like YNAB. I'll spend some time with the manual and the video tutorials this week and try to get my mind wrapped around it all.

Carpet_pissr · Post by **Carpet_pissr** » Wed Jan 22, 2014 1:20 pm

wonderpug wrote:If it's a bigger amount, like a business trip that ran up my credit card over a thousand bucks, I feel the need to be sure I don't think I have money I don't have. I budget the $1000 toward my work category, it gets docked from my available funds, and then live life like that $1000 is completely missing. When the reimbursement comes in, I leave it as income for the month and treat it like normal inflow.

I guess it doesn't matter the amount (except in any potential finance charges), but I regularly put $4-$5K in expenses on my card for each trip I take (maybe 7 per year). Why would we even let YNAB "know" about this since in theory it should be a clean, paid out, then promptly refunded, set of transactions? I know they have a category that you can mark as being outside the budget, or something like that, but again, I'm not sure with such a clean cut process, why I should even include this into my PERSONAL budget (since it's all COMPANY money).

stessier · Post by **stessier** » Wed Jan 22, 2014 1:48 pm

There needs to be a way for threads to get split. All this budget talk is getting in the way of the real story.

LordMortis · Post by **LordMortis** » Wed Jan 22, 2014 1:49 pm

stessier wrote:There needs to be a way for threads to get split. All this budget talk is getting in the way of the real story.

Like

wonderpug · Post by **wonderpug** » Wed Jan 22, 2014 1:52 pm

Carpet_pissr wrote:
wonderpug wrote:If it's a bigger amount, like a business trip that ran up my credit card over a thousand bucks, I feel the need to be sure I don't think I have money I don't have. I budget the $1000 toward my work category, it gets docked from my available funds, and then live life like that $1000 is completely missing. When the reimbursement comes in, I leave it as income for the month and treat it like normal inflow.
I guess it doesn't matter the amount (except in any potential finance charges), but I regularly put $4-$5K in expenses on my card for each trip I take (maybe 7 per year). Why would we even let YNAB "know" about this since in theory it should be a clean, paid out, then promptly refunded, set of transactions? I know they have a category that you can mark as being outside the budget, or something like that, but again, I'm not sure with such a clean cut process, why I should even include this into my PERSONAL budget (since it's all COMPANY money).

I'd say because of the "in theory" part. Keeping it out of YNAB is certainly a viable route to go, but I think things really change since you have to use your personal card. If it were a company credit card, yeah, I'd keep it completely separate.

Let's say... you go hogwild on personal spending in December for Christmas or something. His and her big screen TVs, too. Are you going to hit your limit on that credit card because it already has $5k from a business trip on it?

You normally get promptly refunded for your business trips, but what if something goes wrong in the process sometime? Payroll says they didn't get your expense report. The internet ate it. They changed to new software and you'll get your money in 4 weeks instead of 2. Will you be able to zero your credit card balance that month and avoid interest due to your company's error?

But you may very well have an exception case. For my business trips, I sometimes have to put both hotel and air fare on my personal card ahead of time, and I can't file my expense report until the trip is done. If the trip itself is a week long, by the time I get to file my report and wait for the next pay cycle to get my money, my card can have the company's balance on it far longer than I'd like it to be there.

Smoove_B · Post by **Smoove_B** » Wed Jan 22, 2014 2:12 pm

stessier wrote:There needs to be a way for threads to get split. All this budget talk is getting in the way of the real story.

There's no story. The problem is YNAB doesn't have a "stunt cock" line item. But I'm sure once he enters the correct W-9 / 1099 data, everything will be fine.

Carpet_pissr · Post by **Carpet_pissr** » Wed Jan 22, 2014 2:28 pm

The Meal wrote:
Carpet_pissr wrote:OK DAMMIT, WHOSE ALT IS THIS
I once shook a guy's hand in my B-I-L's driveway who self-identified as ibdoomed who at the time lived in Nebraska. This was back in the GG era, however, and my B-I-L has his doubts that this is the same individual.

I knew ibdoomed. ibdoomed was a friend of mine. "New ibdoomed", you're no ibdoomed.

Edited to add: at what point will "merkins" make an appearance in the thread about budgeting software? This place is an amazing wonder of mysteriousness.

ibdoomed · Post by **ibdoomed** » Wed Jan 22, 2014 5:43 pm

I don't know what a merkin is, should I google that? Let me get my macbook out...

In the meantime, I asked everyone at the office and no one knows where tithing came from, it's just always been the term used. One woman had heard of the church version though, which is pronounced differently. In this case, tomato not tomato.

hepcat · Post by **hepcat** » Wed Jan 22, 2014 5:56 pm

"Hi...Vicki, is it? Listen, I was wondering if you could clear something up for me. You're new, so maybe you can add some perspective from a non-local standpoint. When I say "tithing" do you immediately think of 10 male prostitutes?

No?

HR's office? It's over there by the water cooler."

RunningMn9 · Post by **RunningMn9** » Wed Jan 22, 2014 7:34 pm

For the work expenses, I have a work bucket that is normally $0. When I incur a work expense, I track it as any other expense, with the category set to work expense. Expense reimbursement checks go in as income, but I set the category as work expenses instead of income for the month.

ibdoomed · Post by **ibdoomed** » Thu Feb 06, 2014 12:14 pm

I've been using ynab for about a week now and it's pretty cool. I think I will buy it. That was the problem earlier, that I didn't have a single penny in the account so it wouldn't let me move on, stupid really.

LawBeefaroni · Post by **LawBeefaroni** » Thu Mar 06, 2014 2:06 pm

LawBeefaroni wrote: I'm not really worried about reporting, in fact, just the opposite. I want a number, either positive or negative, for him to put in the hobby line of my filing. As for the behavior modification, that's fine by me, I probably spend too much on my hobbies anyway.

I'll try it either way, I picked it up in the holiday sale for the wife but she took zero interest so I't mine now.

I started using this for my hobby transactions and it was great. One of my things is putting 10% of each hobby transaction (buy and sell) into a rainy-day fund for the family. So I realized I should probably add the fund as an account for tracking purposes. Which meant I should probably add my carrying cash, since that's where I pay the fund from. Long story short, since I like the whole picture I ended up adding all my accounts and threw up a guesstimate budget for January and February. After a month and a half of using it, I love it. It will probably take a few months to fine-tune the budget categories but it's a really well designed program and the Android App makes tracking everything really easy.

RunningMn9 · Post by **RunningMn9** » Fri Apr 18, 2014 11:27 pm

Just as an FYI, the folks at YNAB are going to be entering beta soon on their native iPad app, which will allow budgeting tasks while away from the desktop. A big deal to me.

wonderpug · Post by **wonderpug** » Sat Apr 19, 2014 12:12 am

Just be warned that there's a good chance the app will be quite pricey, as far as iOS apps go. A year+ ago it sounded like they were leaning toward pricing it close to what the desktop version costs, since it's a full-fledged version of the software and they had to pretty much rebuild it from the ground up.

RunningMn9 · Post by **RunningMn9** » Sat Apr 19, 2014 12:25 am

They also announced it will be free.

wonderpug · Post by **wonderpug** » Sat Apr 19, 2014 1:44 am

Fantastic! I had to see for myself, and lo and behold:

I wrote originally that we were going to charge “somewhere in the range of $30-$40” with a potential discount for loyal YNAB customers (that’s you). That’s changed. The coming iPad app will be free.

msteelers · Post by **msteelers** » Mon Aug 25, 2014 6:57 pm

The iPad app has been updated, and it looks pretty slick. It looks like you have full control over your budget as opposed to just being able to add in transactions. Looks good, but I won't actually be able to use it until I go to the bank tomorrow.

RunningMn9 · Post by **RunningMn9** » Thu Aug 28, 2014 11:21 pm

msteelers wrote:The iPad app has been updated, and it looks pretty slick. It looks like you have full control over your budget as opposed to just being able to add in transactions. Looks good, but I won't actually be able to use it until I go to the bank tomorrow.

You kind of have full control over the budget. For some reason it didn't occur to any of their developers to have it work like the desktop app where you can add money to a subcategory by clicking in the box and typing +N.

Instead you can to calculate that part in your head (whatever number that is there, +$N) and then enter the result in the box.

One of the developers told me that adding that simplistic functionality would take months.

It's stupid and it makes me not want to use it, since distributing available money is now a chore.

msteelers · Post by **msteelers** » Fri Aug 29, 2014 7:05 am

Agreed. It's ok for my monthly bills that have the same amount of money budgeted to them every month. But categories like Spending Money changes every week, and that's difficult to change on the iPad.

I'm sure an update will add this feature later, but right now I'll still be mostly using the desktop version.

Bakhtosh · Post by **Bakhtosh** » Fri Aug 29, 2014 2:55 pm

I still use Mvelopes.com
They have a nice iPad app and a great online site.

I'm a premium member and their live chat reps are amazing, anytime you have an issue.
You can get a free account and do most things, and upgrade if you want to add additional features.

http://www.mvelopes.com

RunningMn9 · Post by **RunningMn9** » Thu Dec 31, 2015 7:15 pm

This seems as good a place as any to drop this YNAB news for those that use it. I noticed yesterday that all of my apps had their icons replaced with a "YNAB Classic" logo.

After a quick investigation, it seems that they have released a brand new web-based version of YNAB. This doesn't work with YNAB 4. The old apps will still work with your desktop YNAB 4 files, but support for them is only going through 2016.

I've checked out the new web version, and I have mixed feelings...

1) I don't want to pay for the app again - and even worse, this web-based software is now subscription based ($5 per month or $50 per year). I guess I would pay for newer and better version of the software, but I don't want to keep paying for it, and this isn't better (IMO).

2) The one good thing is that because it is cloud-based, I don't have to have every device linked together with Dropbox. All the apps and the web app on the desktop share data out in the cloud. Which is convenient, until they disappear and I can't access my data.

3) Why the F are they allergic to calculator functionality? In the desktop app (v4), if I needed to move money around, I just had to click in a cell, and type "-100" to remove $100 from that budget item, or "+100" to add $100 to that budget item. They have removed this functionality, and now I have to see what the current budgeted value is, and then use an actual calculator to figure out what the new value should be. It's insanely stupid, and I've argued with their developers in the past about this - it is unacceptable to not have such basic behavior in there.

4) They handle credit cards differently. In the old software, when you spend money on a credit card, and you assigned a category, that money was immediately removed from your budget. Now each credit card has a line in your budget for paying the balance. When you enter a transaction on the card, the money is moved from the category to the one to pay that particular card. I'm ambivalent about this change.

5) The big feature (which I think is new) is that they will go and retrieve your transactions from your financial institutions for you (similar to Mint I guess). I tried to set it up, and it failed to access my bank so I turned it off.

Since it's about to start a new year, I will use the next month see how I like the new version for free. If I like it, I guess that's good. If I don't, I guess it's time I just wrote my own version that works the way that I want it to.

LawBeefaroni · Post by **LawBeefaroni** » Mon May 16, 2016 11:23 am

RunningMn9 wrote:
Since it's about to start a new year, I will use the next month see how I like the new version for free. If I like it, I guess that's good. If I don't, I guess it's time I just wrote my own version that works the way that I want it to.

Verdict?

I need to decide soon whether I'm dumping YNAB or not. I really hate the subscription model.

wonderpug · Post by **wonderpug** » Mon May 16, 2016 11:44 am

LawBeefaroni wrote:
RunningMn9 wrote:
Since it's about to start a new year, I will use the next month see how I like the new version for free. If I like it, I guess that's good. If I don't, I guess it's time I just wrote my own version that works the way that I want it to.
Verdict?

I need to decide soon whether I'm dumping YNAB or not. I really hate the subscription model.

Most people seem to hate the new YNAB, but YNAB 4 continues to be awesome.

msteelers · Post by **msteelers** » Mon May 16, 2016 11:50 am

I didn't like the new YNAB. I tried it for 30 days and then went back to the classic version. I really hate the idea of an ongoing subscription. I might have upgraded if it was a one time payment, but now I'll stick with the classic as long as I can.

RunningMn9 · Post by **RunningMn9** » Mon May 16, 2016 1:11 pm

I'm glad that I waited until now to review, rather than going through the review during the 30-day trial period.

1) I'm never going to be a fan of subscription models, but this one I can live with. At like $5 a month, I can tolerate it.

2) Functionally, I am far more efficient with my process now. While I never got my bank accounts to work for the purposes of downloading transactions, I did get my credit card working, and it's fantastic for automatically validating what my wife and I are entering as we go (and picking up the ones we missed).

3) The convenience of everything using the cloud, I really like. I can access the site from anywhere, not just where I've installed the app. This makes it easier for me to take care of things at work, where I can use the website rather than my phone (since I can't install the software here at work).

4) The lack of calculator isn't a problem because of how the website lets me move money around pretty easily. If a bucket goes negative I can just click on the negative balance, and tell it which bucket I want to take money from to cover the balance. If I have income to distribute, I just click that number and tell it to move $X to Y bucket. I could be *slightly* faster with the +/- working the way I want it to work, but I have adjusted.

Verdict: I would not (and did not) go back to YNAB 4.

coopasonic · Post by **coopasonic** » Mon May 16, 2016 1:17 pm

I have never, ever had a budget. Generally I make more than I spend so I don't sweat it. Things got a little tight last year and we have some medical expenses coming up this year so I feel like i should make some effort to get a handle on it.

Does YNAB have tools to help you set your budget? Like look at the past 6 months and categorize your expenses to set a baseline? I guess the name indicates it is for people that don't know what the hell they are spending now, so it ought to cover that, but I'd like to hear it from someone actually using it.

wonderpug · Post by **wonderpug** » Mon May 16, 2016 1:43 pm

RunningMn9 wrote:Verdict: I would not (and did not) go back to YNAB 4.

Interesting. I continue to get the vibe from other sites that new YNAB is still going through growing pains and such, but if you're giving it a thumbs up I may just have to give it a try.

wonderpug · Post by **wonderpug** » Mon May 16, 2016 1:49 pm

coopasonic wrote:I have never, ever had a budget. Generally I make more than I spend so I don't sweat it. Things got a little tight last year and we have some medical expenses coming up this year so I feel like i should make some effort to get a handle on it.

Does YNAB have tools to help you set your budget? Like look at the past 6 months and categorize your expenses to set a baseline? I guess the name indicates it is for people that don't know what the hell they are spending now, so it ought to cover that, but I'd like to hear it from someone actually using it.

I'd recommend just starting clean and moving forward, but you could certainly enter in old expenses if you wanted to. YNAB 4 doesn't have any dedicated tools for doing that, but I don't know about new YNAB. Once you get going on entering things, you can set the coming month's budget to be an average of the last 3 months or last year of expenses.

Honestly though, just download the trial and give it a go. One of YNAB's biggest strengths over other kinds of budgeting tools is how flexible YNAB is. Set your categories as best you can and see how it goes. At the end of the month you'll either go "wow I guessed pretty well!" or you'll have realizations like "I had no idea I had a $300/month fast food habit." Adjust your habits or your budgeting accordingly.

RunningMn9 · Post by **RunningMn9** » Mon May 16, 2016 7:30 pm

To me, that's going about it all wrong. Budgets are about planning ahead for how to spend the money that you are going to earn. YNAB (for me) is about planning how to spend the money that I've already earned.

I don't have any concept of "next month I can spend $100 on Cheetos and handjobs", and then over the next month I track how much money I spent on Cheetos and handjobs and hope it doesn't go over $100.

In my YNAB world, I have $100 in my account that I can spend on Cheetos and hand jobs. The money is already there. If I spend it on Cheetos and hand jobs, great. I reduce my $100 as I go. If I instead want to spend $20 of those dollars on hot dogs, I do that. I take $20 out of the Cheetos/hand job bucket and put it in the hot dogs bucket.

If I have already spent $90 on Cheetos and hand jobs, and I want to spend another $20, that's ok too. As long as I take $10 from another bucket .

The point is that each of the dollars that I have can only do one thing. YNAB helps me enforce that.

There is budgeting that I do, but that process is just about understanding how to break up my paycheck so that all the buckets are funded the way they need to be funded in order to pay the bills.

wonderpug · Post by **wonderpug** » Mon May 16, 2016 10:05 pm

Right, but if he has $1000 in his checking account, how does he know how much to put toward Cheetos and hand jobs for the first month? He can go back and look at his past 6 months of Cheetos and hand job expenses to establish a baseline, and I'm sure that works for some people, but I'd find that tedious to do for every spending category. If I tried to do that the first month I tried YNAB, I'd probably have given up.

Instead, I'm just saying he should budget his $1000 as best he can without worrying terribly about his past spending. Go ahead and just put $80 toward Cheetos and hand jobs if you think that's enough for his monthly habit. If it turns out he way overshot or undershot his estimate, adjust accordingly.

RunningMn9 · Post by **RunningMn9** » Mon May 16, 2016 10:41 pm

Sorry, I was talking more to coopasonic than you with that.

I agree with you that it's more important to start tracking and then adjust as you learn.

For important stuff (i.e. mortgage), you may have to do some thinking up front. I do have a budget that I've worked out after years of YNAB usage. This helps me know that the mortgage bucket will always have enough money in it when it comes time to pay the mortgage. Every paycheck that goes in, a certain amount goes to the mortgage bucket.

By doing that, the mortgage is always paid on time and I always have the money available to pay it. All of my bills are set up like that. I could be less granular with that - like just have one "Bills" bucket, and pay all bills out of that, but I don't. I feel like it would be too easy to lose track of things and not know where those dollars are actually going.

Carpet_pissr · Post by **Carpet_pissr** » Tue May 17, 2016 12:09 pm

RunningMn9 wrote:I take $20 out of the Cheetos/hand job bucket and put it in the hot dogs bucket.

I'll take "Phrases likely never repeated in the history of man" for $200, Alex!

stessier · Post by **stessier** » Tue May 17, 2016 12:30 pm

Does YNAB allow buckets to go negative? I understand why you wouldn't want that to happen but I allow deficit spending now and would like to keep that going forward.

Ninyu · Post by **Ninyu** » Tue May 17, 2016 12:42 pm

stessier wrote:Does YNAB allow buckets to go negative? I understand why you wouldn't want that to happen but I allow deficit spending now and would like to keep that going forward.

Yes, buckets can go negative but usually it doesn't stay negative long since you would assign some free dollars from your income or pull money out of another bucket to settle the deficit.

stessier · Post by **stessier** » Tue May 17, 2016 12:43 pm

Ninyu wrote:
stessier wrote:Does YNAB allow buckets to go negative? I understand why you wouldn't want that to happen but I allow deficit spending now and would like to keep that going forward.
Yes, buckets can go negative but usually it doesn't stay negative long since you would assign some free dollars from your income or pull money out of another bucket to settle the deficit.

Okay, but you nothing forces you to settle up, right? And then the negative balance would be effected when the next check went in?

LawBeefaroni · Post by **LawBeefaroni** » Tue May 17, 2016 3:00 pm

RM9, thanks for the impressions. I'll give it a try.

stessier wrote:
Okay, but you nothing forces you to settle up, right? And then the negative balance would be effected when the next check went in?

It doesn't force you. In fact, in that's how it handles things like credit card accounts. I put in every transaction as an expense and then when I pay the card the negative balance goes away. I think that's also how it handles long term debt too, things like loans that aren't already assigned.

stessier · Post by **stessier** » Tue May 17, 2016 4:39 pm

Cool, thanks.

RunningMn9 · Post by **RunningMn9** » Tue May 17, 2016 6:11 pm

Yeah the only thing that I found odd was that it wouldN'T carry a negative balance forward month to month. I think that was YNAB 4. Not sure if that's still a thing in the web app, because I don't allow myself to do it anymore.

jimbo · Post by **jimbo** » Wed May 18, 2016 6:57 am

There is a setting that allows overspending to be carried over to the next month. We use this for categories that we get reimbursed for (i.e. we buy things (shoes, clothes, etc.) for a relative in assisted living and their son writes us a check or travel expenses at work).

If you click in the Category balance, this window pops up: