Are you the type of person that enters your transactions into your budget as soon as they happen?
With YNAB(and other apps have started adding this functionality), you can manually add the transactions that you place immediately. Even if your budget imports your transactions later.
If you’re someone who just imports your transactions later, this step may seem totally unnecessary to you.
But I believe that manually adding transactions right after you make your purchase will save you a lot of time in the long run, even if it seems like a real pain in the moment.
Process for Manually Entering Transactions and Matching
YNAB is great because of how it imports transactions that have cleared your bank account into your budget. In fact, there’s a whole swath of budgeting apps out there that do this.
What I particularly like about YNAB is the control you have in your budget when it comes to adding those transactions ahead of when they clear your bank and are imported using your budget.
When you enter a transaction ahead of time that YNAB imports, it simply notices that the price of something that it’s importing is the price of something you’ve already added and it matches them up.
You simply approve the match and move on.
Multicategory purchases are a pain.
There’s no getting around it.
You’re at Target and you have a basket full of items.
You’ve got some groceries, toiletries, some things for the house you had to pick up, some clothes you liked, and maybe something else for your partner.
If you’re budgeting then you likely have all of these items pulled from different categories. You likely have a category for groceries, another category for household expenses like toiletries, then you may have multiple categories to keep track of spending like having accounts for both you and your partner.
There’s going to be some pain somewhere in there when trying to manage a budget with all of that different stuff coming from one store.
You’ve got some different options.
You could just create a category that keeps track of places like Target, where every time you spend money at Target, it simply comes out of that category no matter what you’re buying that day.
But if you do that are you really going to be able to track how much you’re spending in your grocery or toiletry category? So then you’ve solved one problem but created a new one. You may be able to track how much you spend at Target each month really really well, but now you’re losing track of how much is coming from groceries, toiletries, and personal spending.
You’ve also got the option of going back through after those transactions have been imported and splitting them up then. If you’ve added your card to the Target app, then you can easily go back through your past purchases to see them. Here, you could pull out your calculator and start splitting up those old transactions into your budget the way they should go.
The problem here is that you’ll likely have big transactions that haven’t been assigned a category, so your budget is off until you fix it. When you have all of these transactions importing into your budget that you’re waiting to split and assign, you just really can’t trust your budget because you’re not exactly sure that your categories are right to begin with.
The last option is likely your best.
That’s to take your receipt and split it among your categories as soon as you can.
The best time to split those is as soon as you walk out of the store and get in your car. Take the couple of minutes, pull out the receipt, add a few things together with your calculator and decide exactly how you’ll be splitting that purchase up in your budgeting app.
The pain is taking the couple of minutes to do it, but taking those minutes saves you a much larger amount of time down the road when it’s time to reconcile your balances. Now you don’t have to hunt for receipts, or look online to find the breakdown on how you’ll need to split up a transaction.
You’ve spent some time, but you’ll be saving that time and more down the road.
Keeping up with transactions is the largest part of budget upkeep. If you stay on top of your transactions as they happen, two things will happen.
One is that your budget always reflects the most accurate and up to date information. The second is that you’ve essentially eliminated all budget upkeep for the month.
There’s nothing more to do except confirm the amount in your account as you reconcile.
So this month, try taking the moment to input that transaction before you move on. The benefit is that those small moments are all you need to stay on top of your budget.
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