I am here because YNAB utterly failed me. Their response is what pushed me here, finally

Discussion
1

This is not intended to bash YNAB. That happens a lot elsewhere so I’d add nothing to it, nor is it fruitful. However, I do feel like I can add some perspective for anyone trying to decided between Tiller and YNAB, or looking to move away, etc.

I have been a longtime user of YNAB. Looking back, I believe it has been right arond 16 years. Desktop version to nYNAB/web version was a hard transition, but I just got used to it and I wouldn’t say it was “the best”, but I was comfortable with it and it worked well for me. I molded to what it wanted me to do, shouted often at the seemingly idiotic and short-sighted ‘features’ and changes that were made seemingly for no apparent reason. i.e. a lot of 'Who even wanted this!?" type of questions. They very much have an authoritative approach to development and most customer service folks seem to be less familiar with it than I am! This authoritative approach was pretty evident when they closed up their community forums.

I digress a little here. So I will say that I did appreciate YNAB. I started using it when we were newlyweds and living in poverty with our 2 (later came the 3rd) kids. Over the past decade and a half we have increased our financial literacy, freedom, and financial position exponentially and recently bought our dream farm and are living quite comfortably and I have to say that YNAB absolutely played a critical role in that journey. I am grateful for that.

However…as the years past, not much changed with them, especially not anything that was worth constantly increasing subscription costs. We wanted reports, backups, flexibility in customization, not different and new emojis and buttons swapping places. It has required a browser plugin for those of us users to be able to customize a lot of it.

Then, after 15 years, last night’s destruction happened. When manually entering new transactions, my payee list would cause the entire process to lag about 10 seconds+ every single time. I realize it was because I had 8900+ payees that YNAB saved in my budget and it was trying to autopopulate based on that. It had gotten worse over the past couple of months for some reason. This number of payees was mainly due to the way banks reported - For instance "AMAZON.COM RJIGHS*0000 111919 was a different payee than AMAZON.COM JJKUHN0009 121423, etc.

It was suggested that I use the manage payees window to trim these down - there was no way to automate this process or make it easier. They literally suggested I effectively manually touch 8900+ transactions as if this was in any way a reasonable suggestion. You could not select all and just remove them from auto population. There was the option to do this, but the total number you could do this with was limited. I did discover you could click on, and then hold shift or control and select further down to select multiple payees to combine them all. Here is where it went south quick.

Their manage payees window is so small and poorly designed that it is impossible to see what all you have selected in a shift+click situation but I thought I was being careful. Once I was done and had reduced my payees down to about 1900 (3.5 hours if anyone is curious). I went to my accounts only to see - there sure were a LOAD of transactions with the payee of “Department of Motor Vehicles” now. Horrified, I started doing some damage assessment. Turns out about 2900 transactions, spanning back 7 years or so had all now been assigned to Department of Motor Vehicles. The actions take to get to this point were my own; however, YNAB gets all the blame for making it this easy to mess it up this bad.

This was the last straw - I was told there is no backup. There is no way to restore, that I have effectively 2 options:

  1. Go through the 2900 changed transactions and manually convert them to the proper payees
  2. Start over

No joke.

I do have a csv backup from 8/30 of this year because, ironically, I was searching to find a solution to switch to because I was tired of the constant price increases. I ultimately decided against it for now because, for all it’s faults and rigid implementation, it was familiar, I could work in it flawlessly and quickly and I did trust it. No more. There is no way I am doing either of their suggestions and the fact that they legit think this is a proper suggestion in this situation is absurd. They won’t pro-rate refund my subscription, I do not think (go figure, right), but that is OK. Can’t do anything about it now. However, if I am going to do that much work again, it will not be with a product that failed so miserably. Everyone’s budget is effectively resting on top of a house of cards and sadly a lot of folks probably have no clue.

So here I am. I think the learning curve will be a challenge, but after my experience with YNAB, I am ready. I am sure you all will be hearing from me as I ramp this up. Let’s do this (I’m a cashew…for a throwback reference!)

Mike

5 Likes
2

I came from Mint after using it 15+ years, and Tiller is better in every way at this point. It’s just a matter of learning which sheets/templates you need to get the data you want, and how to tweak them if need be. YNAB is something I tried but I could never get into it. After using Tiller, I can tell you it completely dominates YNAB. You’re going to love this product. Congrats on making the switch, albeit for an annoying and very frustrating reason.

1 Like
3

Welcome to Tiller @g2kk9phx Mike!

Thank you for sharing your experience. I can only imagine how painful it was to go through manually correcting all those payees.

4

Welcome to Tiller. There are a lot of YNAB, Mvelopes, and mint refugees here.

5

Welcome. I’ve tried many of the platforms in this space, and I really do think Tiller is the best and most customizable of the lot. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s very hard to be perfect in a world of imperfect financial institutions.

1 Like
6

I’ve used YNAB web off and on for several years. I also use Tiller Money. I just quit YNAB a week ago. Many of the reasons were the same as yours - especially when it would auto assign payees to the wrong merchant! The only way to fix was to use their API and download my transactions into a Tiller spreadsheet (yes, it can be done, but it’s a lot of (fun) work to write the formulas) and look at the “full” description, then I could fix them. Also their rules for budgeting are super strict and unforgiving. Goals would act unpredictably and were very hard to figure out. (again I used my Tiller gained Sheets knowledge to figure out if I was on track for the goals. Oh - you CAN get a refund of remaining subscription, but you have to delete your account entirely and the refund will happen automatically. I just got one a few days ago after I clicked “delete” on my account.
If you want to check out another budget app, try Goodbudget. It is pure envelope budgeting with reconcile and goals. There are no rules to follow, you can do what you like. They have a great export in CSV format that I am using to import into my Tiller Foundation Sheet. (lots of manipulation to get it “Transaction Sheet Like”, but fun do do. If you have USA banks, they will also sync your accounts. I’m in Canada, which they don’t support bank here. But I’ve lost my faith in aggregator syncing so am content with downloading bank exports and plain manual entry.
I don’t really want to bash YNAB (too much) , but I do want to give a plug for Tiller’s Savings Budget. It really works well and will let you go into negative on a budget (which IS sometimes necessary). Take the time to learn it, and I think you’ll like it.

4 Likes