Limitations on YNAB and how to tackle it with Zapier

Our main goal for using YNAB is to limit our spending. So far, YNAB works fine in tracking our spending throughout the month. From an interface perspective, it has a green progress bar on each category to indicate your expenses status.

Despite of the indicator, we feel that there is a missing piece here. When we look at the remaining expenses of $650 at some point as shown below, we notice that there is a possibility of overspending and there is a need to alert ourselves with the daily spending. A question then comes into mind - How much more can I spend daily in the rest of the month on restaurant & drinks?

As such, we demand an answer on how can allocate the remaining budget to avoid overspending in the end of the month. This inspired me (the mastermind haha) to set up our own backend service to enrich our experience with YNAB and thereby creating the report below. Out of the daily report, we get an accurate figure on the remaining budget for the coming days (i.e. $181.58 to spend per day in the coming 2 days for LKY's budget as the MTD spending is $1,675.85). By adding the colors to the side bar, we are able to identify right away whose budget is alarmingly high (it does happen on occasionally to her!)

Zapier integration for automations

What if you are not familiar with coding? Not a problem. YNAB is now connected to Zapier for end users to create automation tasks. It works in a way that when certain event triggers, Zapier will automatically perform some actions for you. One such example is when the balance of oyster card is below certain level (trigger), a transfer from another account is made (action) to record the auto top-up transaction. Get an idea here on some of the possible automations.

I personally did not go for automations with Zapier for now as we have built our own private service way before YNAB is connected with Zapier. Technically, we had all our automated tasks settled and customised and it wouldn't be worthwhile to take extra effort in setting up those on Zapier. For those who would like to explore Zapier, just be aware that the number of steps are limited in the free tier of Zapier. But once again it's definitely a good and handy choice for most, especially those do not code or find coding too time-consuming.

If you feel like trying YNAB out, here is a referral link to sign up for a free trial of 34 days. (By signing up through our referral link you will get a free month of YNAB if you subscribe it after the trial!)