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. Just filter out the rollover category in your reports.
This has a global dependency on node. Also, we use pnpm as
the package manager in this project.
To install local dependencies, run pnpm i. Make sure you are providing the app your API
token, otherwise it will not work. Do this via an env.local file at project root.
You should create a payee called Budget Rollover, an account called Budget Rollover,
and a category called Rollover Offset. You can set the initial 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, or via .env files.
TOKEN: your YNAB API token. This can also be added in anindex.tokenfile at the root ofsrc.BUDGET_ID: the ID 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 offset in the to be budgeted account (such as business expenses). Defaults to"Unbudgeted".
This can be run with node --env-file=.env [--env-file=.env.local] . [schedule|apply|market-value|zero|clear].
Before you run make sure you build it with
pnpm build.
schedule: starts a daemon in the foreground to run apply every 2 minutes.apply: runs the script to apply the rollover amounts to your budget.market-value: checks the latest market value of currencies that are noted in account notes and updates the account balance based on that value.zero: runs the script that zeros out all existing rollover transactions.clear: clears the local cache of saved IDs and transactions.
You can run the app with livereload enabled by running pnpm watch.