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The power of ynab isn't the tool, but the philosophy. The UI works well because it changes how you think of your budget. I'm a little disappointed the author di

The power of ynab isn't the tool, but the philosophy. The UI works well because it changes how you think of your budget. I'm a little disappointed the author didn't comment on how ledger compares with the budgeting side, as tracking expenses is only half (or less) of the battle. I'd recommend ynab because it forces you to plan instead of react. I think as far as software goes, that's the fundamental advantage- you think differently. It's kind of like how editing in vim you start to think in terms of verb-object. I'm stuck on ynab4 for as long as possible, but you can try out the nYNAB (the SaaS offering) for free for a little more than a month. If you get it, be sure to watch the instructional videos.

ams6110 10y ago
ledger can do budgeting: http://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Budgeting http://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Budgeting
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  That help section on budgeting only talks about periodic transactions. Is there also some notion of "estimated future, one-off, transaction"? I suppose you could implement that using ordinary transactions. It's just that after fighting with gnucash, I got the impressions that budgeting and accounting are very different things and that I should not try to use the same tool for both jobs.
  - ams6110 10y ago
    I think you could just use a "yearly" period for that. When I used ledger, I started a new file every year.
  - db48x 10y ago
    Yea, I thought that was a pretty incomplete part of the documentation when I looked through it recently. I haven't done any budgeting in ledger, but the section on virtual accounts seemed like it presented a better way to do a budget: http://ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Introduction-to-Ledger http://ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Introduction-to-L....
andrewaylett 10y ago
+1 philosophy, that's been the biggest change for me compared to trying (and failing) to use other systems. I don't see why YNAB4 would stop working -- certainly I intend to keep using it as long as I can. I also noticed that you can still buy a license on Steam, at least in the UK, and having run the application once through Steam you apparently get a license key that works standalone. And v4 runs well on Linux using wine :).

ams6110 10y ago

ledger can do budgeting: http://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Budgeting http://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Budgeting

adrianratnapala 10y ago
That help section on budgeting only talks about periodic transactions. Is there also some notion of "estimated future, one-off, transaction"? I suppose you could implement that using ordinary transactions. It's just that after fighting with gnucash, I got the impressions that budgeting and accounting are very different things and that I should not try to use the same tool for both jobs.
- ams6110 10y ago
  I think you could just use a "yearly" period for that. When I used ledger, I started a new file every year.
- db48x 10y ago
  Yea, I thought that was a pretty incomplete part of the documentation when I looked through it recently. I haven't done any budgeting in ledger, but the section on virtual accounts seemed like it presented a better way to do a budget: http://ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Introduction-to-Ledger http://ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Introduction-to-L....

andrewaylett 10y ago

+1 philosophy, that's been the biggest change for me compared to trying (and failing) to use other systems. I don't see why YNAB4 would stop working -- certainly I intend to keep using it as long as I can. I also noticed that you can still buy a license on Steam, at least in the UK, and having run the application once through Steam you apparently get a license key that works standalone. And v4 runs well on Linux using wine :).