Pull in Category Target Info
complete
Dave Comstock
Would be great to have a report that shows you what categories you tend to overspend in relative to the targets you’ve set in YNAB. This would allow users to occasionally go back and update their targets based how much they’ve spent in a particular category. Right now to do that is a very manual process…
Brandon Trautmann
complete
Marking complete as my initial take on this is rolling out in 1.18.7. I am sure we will iterate on it, but we can create new tickets for changes to the implementation.
Brandon Trautmann
in progress
Will be released in 1.19.x
Brandon Trautmann
Dave Comstock I did a bit of playing with this today and I'm pretty pleased with the first pass. Likely, I will release this soon and get feedback to iterate on... For full transparency this will _probably_ be a premium chart.
Dave Comstock
Brandon Trautmann This looks amazing and was exactly what I was envisioning, thank you for following up. How would it calculate the averages to show you’ve been overspending in a category? Is it just over the last 12 mo’s? No problem about it being a premium chart because I’m a premium subscriber. :-)
Brandon Trautmann
Dave Comstock so right now the way this works (and I'll add text in the chart description to explain this as well) is as follows:
- Targets are coerced to their monthly funding amounts. For example, a yearly target will have it's target balance divided by 12. A weekly target will have its target balance multiplied by something like 4.35 to get an approximation of a monthly amount. This is done for a few reasons. First, our budgets are funded/viewed monthly--even if we don't get paid monthly. Secondly, this makes the visualization much simpler to understand when considering targets that have vastly different cadences (e.g every 2 weeks vs every 2 years). Lastly, Lumy right now is limited to monthly time periods. In the future I plan on making this more flexible, but for now I try to make the app feel consistent so it's not confusing.
- The spending amount is an average for the duration chosen on the reports page. If you select, say, Jun 2024 - Aug 2024, the spending for a given category is the monthly average of those 3 months. If you select the latest 12 months, you'll see an average for those 12 months. While this obviously impacts the data you'll see in the report, I think it provides the flexibility required to analyze your spending. If I hard-coded it to, say, 12 months, you may not be able to view a category that is funded/spent on a 24 month basis since that category hasn't had any spending in the past 12 months. I hope that makes sense.
PS: I'm very open to feedback/thoughts on this approach. The logic here will be fairly easy to change/iterate on! That's the primary reason I try to make reports as simple/plain as possible in the beginning, I don't want to code myself into a corner right off the bat :)
Dave Comstock
Brandon Trautmann Got it thanks Brandon, that all sounds logical to me! Definitely understand the need to not overcomplicate things… for my purposes of simply trying to gauge whether (on average) I am spending within my means based on the targets I’ve established this should work very well. Thank you for always being so responsive! Your app is amazing and so helpful in filling in the reporting gaps that YNAB will likely never address…. now once we get the web app version (hint hint hehe) that will really give me everything I need. Thanks for making such a great product!
Dave Comstock
Hey Brandon! Thanks for the reply... Yes you've articulated my use case exactly as I was thinking. Essentially some type of report that gives users a "pulse check" on their targets and if they're spending over those targets. It would be great to change the date range so you can look back 12mo, 18mos etc.
However, I'm not sure what this would actually look like in the Lumy app itself, as I'm not a developer and not sure what's involved from a dev standpoint. It would just be nice to have a more automated way to see what categories you're 'overspending' on relative to your targets so you can re-adjust and modify targets appropriately (if you want to)
Dana
Maybe like the burn down chart, but showing green if you're under target, red if over target. Click into detail mode to show min, max, average and target amount.
Brandon Trautmann
Dave Comstock Thanks for the feature request! This is a common request I see on the YNAB subreddit for native YNAB to implement, and I merged in another similar post. My understanding is folks want to generally see what they've "committed to" funding in a given month, perhaps compared to their actual/expected _income_ and average _spending_. This basically gives you a loose "pulse check" on whether your targets/goals are reasonable and sound and if not, how to massage them.
One thing I'm still trying to iron out in my mind is what this report would look like. Do you have any ideas? As Noah Zambrano points out in the merged post, we'd probably want to see this info by category with ability to filter (presumably using an existing category view?). I could see it being a bar chart where there's 2 series, one for target amount for a given category and one for average spending in that category. Then if the spending bar was higher than the target bar you would know at a glance that you probably need to adjust that target or reel in spending. However I'm not sure how we'd show _income_ relative to the sum of all targets. I'd love this to be a single cohesive and crystal clear report if possible!
Brandon Trautmann
Merged in a post:
Sum of Targets Report
Noah Zambrano
I would love a Sum of Targets report. Just a total of all targets, spending or saving. If this could be filter-able, even better. Basically, an easier version of the “move to an unfunded month and look at underfunded”. Thank you so much!