YNAB/IFTTT integration

I use YNAB to create my budgets. It works perfectly for how I like to manage my money and as such it’s a big part of my life.

I’d therefore love to see an integration between Monzo and YNAB in the US. More specifically, I’d like to be able to automatically import my Monzo transactions into YNAB, whether it’s through IFTTT or some other means.

I can see that IFTTT integration is on the ‘ideas we might explore’ on the product roadmap, and I’ve upvoted it there. So I guess this post is me adding some extra emphasis to that upvote, and seeing whether there are any other YNAB-ers on this side of the Atlantic who’d also like to see this feature!

Michael

Hi Michael. I also use (and rely on) YNAB for managing finances and use it with Monzo, albeit less-and-less as Monzo add great features. I’m UK based by the way.

I’ve got my Monzo Joint Account and my Monzo Personal account to automatically add transactions to the corresponding accounts in YNAB. It’s a bit technical to set up and relies on an external service to run, but it has been solid for me since I started using it 18 months ago. The Topic & instructions are here;

Good luck :crossed_fingers:

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hey @davidwalton thanks very much for your reply.

I’ll give that github plugin a try. I wonder if it’ll work in the US…will report back when I’ve had a chance to play around with it!

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I’m also curious to hear a bit more about your Monzo-YNAB set up. You mentioned you are using YNAB less and less as Monzo add features. Which Monzo features do you find are replacing YNAB’s equivalents?

Monzo’s Bills Pots (coupled with Salary Sorter) have kind of obsoleted the budgeting side of things for me. The amount left in my account after Salary Sorter has run is mine to do whatever I want with, and as long as I don’t spend more than that, then I’m good.

I never really budgeted as such, and nowhere near the level of budgeting tools YNAB offers. Instead, I use the forecasting method - looking forward to see how transactions now will affect future finances. Amazingly, YNAB didn’t even offer a running balance and so I used the ‘Toolkit’ browser extension which introduced a valuable running balance tally into the future. However, YNAB recently introduced a native running balance so I don’t use Toolkit anymore.

If Monzo allowed one-off/repeating future transactions to be manually entered and also displayed the calculated future running balance per transaction, then I’d ditch YNAB and go #fullmonzoplanning

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That’s really interesting. I didn’t know about the salary sorter feature - sounds very useful. I hope that comes to the US as well (we don’t have it over here yet). I can see how that (with bills pots) would enable you to basically ‘enforce’ whatever budget allocation you had decided on, at least for rent, direct debits etc.

I have found a lot of value in the ability to manually create categories in YNAB. I tend to find that pre-defined budget categories (like Monzo’s) never quite match up to how I think about my money. I always want to break it down further. For example, I like to separate out ‘refreshments’ from ‘eating-out’, so that I can track how much money I am spending on the odd drink or snack at coffee shops.

I’ve tried creating my own sub-categories in Monzo using "#"s (tags) but because I can’t attach a number to them that doesn’t go far enough for me.

That’s one of the things that keeps me coming back to YNAB.

I also really value the ability in YNAB to track the ‘age’ of your money, easily re-allocate funds when you under/over-budget and the features they have to help you when your budget rolls over to the next month.

So I can’t foresee ditching YNAB any time soon, much as I’d like to simplify my life and consolidate tools where I can. We’ll see what happens though - as it’s early days in terms of my time using Monzo, and early days for Monzo in the US!

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There is already a way you can link the two, using both services API’s and Webhooks I believe, plus IFTTT Platform, that the folks over at YNAB posted this some time ago.

I’m not sure how easy it is to set up, I initially tried the one on Github.

Much like @davidwalton though, since the arrival of Bill Pots, I’m kind of getting a less involved way to budget by having that. (And using IFTTT for other transactions).

Good luck with it :slight_smile:

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Monzo ‘Custom categories’ coming soon in-app! (hopefully for US users too :crossed_fingers: )

I’m with you here - if someone made the right ‘tool’ to allow day-to-day personal finance to be as simple as possible, a lot of people would be all over it. Including me. Come on :monzo:

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Thanks Ben!

Yeah I gave that IFTTT integration a try but it didn’t work for me :frowning_face: The Monzo IFTTT trigger wouldn’t work. I think it’s because the IFTTT integration isn’t set up for Monzo US yet. I know it’s on their radar though as a feature to consider in the future. Fingers crossed it gets added

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The sub-categories is defintely a super powerful thing - it’s that that helped me properly thing about money and do so in a sustainable way.

The one category approach is really hard in Monzo, given there are just so many things that your money has to do.

Pots can sort of fill a bit of that void, but not all of it… Frustratingly as well, managing Pots in YNAB is a bit messy for my liking too.

One day, fingers crossed, it will come.

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Oh exciting! That would be amazing.

@davidwalton @BritishLibrary I can confirm that the YNAB github plugin works in the US as well, which is awesome! This will make my life a lot easier. Thanks again for your help!

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Awesome - thanks for confirming!