A script that enables you to rollover your negative balances in YNAB. I've contacted YNAB support multiple times to support this natively – they basically said they don't want to (stupid!). So I did it myself using their API. It's hacky, but it works for my family. The one downside that I don't really have a workaround for is that it messes up the "activity" total for a category with a rollover amount, as the rollover amount is rendered as a transaction.
This only has a global dependency on node.
To install local dependencies, run npm i. Make sure you are providing the app your API token, otherwise it will not work.
You should create a payee called Budget Rollover, an account called Budget Rollover, and a category called Rollover Offset. You can set the inital balance of the account to zero and close it right away, and you can also hide the category after creating it.
You can pass parameters in the command line when running this. This is like standard parameters – for *sh, you can do something like TOKEN=abcdefg BUDGET_NAME="Secondary" npm run start. If you run this with different a different budget name, then revert to the default, you may have to clear the cache to get it to point to the right budget.
TOKEN: your YNAB API token. This can also be added in an index.token file at the root of src.
BUDGET_NAME: the name of the budget that you want to apply this to. Defaults to "last-used".
ROLLOVER_PAYEE: the payee to use for the rollover transactions. Defaults to "Budget Rollover"
ROLLOVER_ACCOUNT: the account to use for the rollover transactions. Defaults to "Budget Rollover"
ROLLOVER_CATEGORY: the category to use for the rollover transactions. Defaults to "Rollover Offset"
INFLOWS_CATEGORY: the name of the inflows category. Defaults to "Inflows".
PAYMENTS_GROUP: the name of the credit card payments group. Defaults to "Credit Card Payments".
GROUPS_TO_OFFSET: the comma separated names of the category groups that should be offsetted in the to bo budgeted about (such as business expenses). Defaults to "Ferreira.Life,Unbudgeted".
This can be run with node . [apply|zero|clear]. To automatically build then run, use use npm run start.
apply: runs the script to apply the rollover amounts to your budget.zero: runs the script that zeros out all existing rollover transactions.clear: clears the local cache of saved IDs and transactions.
If you want to build without running, run
npm run build.
You can run the app with livereload enabled by running npm run watch.