I made a pack to sync from budgeting software I use, YNAB (You Need A Budget)
I’ve found it handy in a surprising variety of ways to be able to pull my financial transactions and budgets into Coda.
If you find the pack useful or have feedback, let me know
Thank you for this, David!
I have 3 different budgets, though, and I can’t seem to connect them… I figured I would have to have 1 Coda doc per budget and create 3 different YNAB connections to choose a different budget in each connection, but it always connects to the same budget. Is it possible to connect to multiple budgets?
You should be able to select a non-default budget in the sync table settings
You can find the sync table settings under the table’s “Options”:
And you should see “Budget ID” as an option which should autocomplete if you type in a budget name:
Got it, thank you so much!
I’m a big fan and user of YNAB, so very happy to have found your Pack! (incidentally I found it on YNAB API page, as I thought a pack should be made)
Thank you for creating it, it will really help integrating cost tracking into my project management docs!
You wrote that
are not currently supported. Is there any chance that they will be in the (near) future?
That would be awesome, and would definitely help making the YNAB/Coda collaboration more Coda-centric.
Thanks again!
The main reason I haven’t added creating & updated transactions is because the YNAB API does some unusual things with oauth scopes: the blank scope has write access and the “read-only” doesn’t, so it’s impossible to take an existing “read-only” connection and prompt a user if they want to add write access later. I was hesitant to make the pack request write access for everyone all the time since other security-minded folks like myself might prefer to install apps that request minimal access by default. Ideally I’d like to track down someone at YNAB and see if they’re willing to implement a write oauth scope so that read-only,write works the same was as the blank scope. If there’s enough demand from the community I’m open to switching the default scope and adding create/update functions in the meantime.
Scheduled transactions would be doable. The trick is to figure out what’s the best approach for table design. One way might be to try to make them part of the “Transactions” table, maybe putting “date_next” as the transaction date and introducing new columns on the transaction table for “frequency” and “date_first”. The other option would be to make a separate table entirely. Any thoughts on which would better suit your use case?
Dear David,
Thank you for taking the time to write a detailed answer!
Regarding scheduled transactions, I’d like to use them to make cashflow forecasts for the non-profit I work for. We use YNAB to gather future costs and revenues as scheduled transactions (repeating or not).
In YNAB, a single future transaction is shown for every repeating transactions. Once in Coda, I could calculate cashflow for e.g. the coming six months. So, to answer your question regarding my use case, I don’t think a separate table is better than integrating the scheduled transactions with the past transactions — I have to generate more transactions anyways, either from a separate table, or from a single instance in the current transactions.
I see one advantage though in making them part of the Transactions table: filtering with date=Today() will work between two syncs.
The implementation you suggest seems great. I’m not sure date_next and date_first are necessary though: with the date of the current instance of the scheduled transaction and its frequency, date_next can be computed. And the previous instances are part of the past transactions any way.
Regarding creating and updated transactions, I was not aware of the intricacies of OAuth scopes, and I totally see your point to avoid giving a blank cheque when dealing with financial data. I would however be very happy to be able to create scheduled transactions from Coda, for every project in our project management doc. Given the number of existing community applications using the YNAB API, I hope YNAB will be interested in implementing a write OAuth scope as you suggested!
@Sebastien, what fields are most important to you in terms of creating and updating transactions? Would it still be useful to you if there were create and update functions that worked for simple transactions but not for split transactions?
Definitely! My use case foresees very few split transactions, and they would any way be created within YNAB, from bank transactions rather than scheduled transactions.
By decreasing order of importance: Amount, Payee, Category, Memo, Date, Account
And Clear, Flag and Repeat would not be used as far as I know.
That would be amazing to be able to create/update transactions from Coda using these six fields. Thank you for your willingness to extend your pack!
I’ve added a new “include scheduled” optional parameter to the transactions sync table to include scheduled transactions
I’ve also updated the pack with update & create actions. Not all fields or transaction types are supported. I haven’t documented the formulas yet in example doc, so if you try it out soon and anything feels off I might be able to make breaking changes before anyone else notices the feature exists.
Let me know if these updates meet your needs
Hi David, my intention is to use this to develop a suite of reports that will track financial independence.
e.g. net worth, monthly expenses vs income (and rolling averages), savings ratio, personal inflation rate and so forth.
Your pack is a brilliant start, but I’ve realised I’m missing monthly data, especially account balance by month, and expenditure in each category by month. Is this something you would consider implementing in the future?
Spending by category by month is relatively simple to aggregate or filter
Coda supports grouping, for example, so you could make a calculated month column based on transaction date and make views of transactions grouped by month with the group summary column set to Sum the transaction values for each month
I don’t track my net worth monthly, but FYI here’s how I track it yearly: Yearly Net Worth Tracker
You could maybe aggregate account balance each month, but there are two challenges:
I did actually experiment with making a category balance per budget month sync table since the YNAB API supports that, but in my own budget I have over 100 categories and I ended up hitting the 10k sync table, so I would need to add parameters to help filter which categories and months to include to make that useful (for myself, at least)
Thanks for making this pack! I’ve gotten everything to sync up, but the create transaction action will absolutely not work for me. I have it matching the fields correctly, but I keep getting a server error.
Thank you so much for making this! My frustrations with YNAB (which I recently shared with them with a video) may be able to be fixed using this Pack, or at least partly. However, I think I must be really dumb as I am not sure how to pull in the account balance data. I can see the name, type, etc., but not the balance. I’m sure I’m just missing something here, but any help would be appreciated.
You’re not missing anything, I never added balance to the accounts table since I mostly use the pack for the transactions table
It should be relatively easy to add account balance, though. I’ll take a look on Monday
That would be appreciated! I was working on a solution. I am trying to get the running balance to work across views by using a formula I am making in Coda. I got it to work perfectly across one view, but it did not quite work with the other views. Working on a work around right now.
I’m trying to actually make a little better version of YNAB using Coda. I love YNAB, don’t get me wrong. But I’ve been increasingly frustrated with the lack of more robust features added as I’ve been a user for nearly 15 years, way back when YNAB 3 was a stand-alone desktop app. I’m hoping to basically make it so I operate my budget mostly in Coda rather than YNAB. The biggest thing for me is having a place to keep track of my bills better (like, with a calender view). I am constantly hopping back and forth between YNAB and Coda for this reason. It would be nice to just be in one place, and I can create custom dashboards for it.
