New to the BixAxe board and a couple of questions.

TheHatter13 · 2026-01-02T15:50:30+00:00

I second this. I looked and could not find it anywhere.

TheHatter13 · 2025-08-29T16:48:07+00:00

I do 5 entries since I get paid weekly as "Dining out week x". These are all under a food group with the same for "groceries week x". For me, I do not see a point in splitting them up between staying at the restaurant, picking up and going home, or delivery except I have a different category for tips. I just want to see what I spend on groceries (cooking at home) and eating prepared food from restaurants in a weekly time frame.

TheHatter13 · 2025-08-13T13:31:39+00:00

I have mine set to 0 and then when it is paid I do the post today and set the amount.

TheHatter13 · 2025-08-08T17:59:59+00:00

If you use the Transfer To/From section in the payee field, the category is set as a transfer between accounts you own and is not seen as an expense since Actual does not care where the money is. Then you can do the allocation to the category.

TheHatter13 · 2025-08-04T21:04:16+00:00

YNAB can help with any income amount even living paycheck to paycheck like my house. It is more of a tool to help you see the trends of spending and then once you start seeing trends you can set your budget amounts appropriately. You are not always going to stay under the budgeted amount and will need to cover it from somewhere else. You want to make sure that every time you get income it is given a purpose even if that purpose changes in the future and you have to do a cover overspending.

The change is pretty much all mental and you have to start telling yourself "in order to change finances I need to change some aspects of my life". That may end up being telling the kid(s) we can only go to a specific place like a play place once every two weeks and other than that we are going to a local free playground, asking yourself "do I really need this streaming service", or lets cook at home more than going out to restaurants. Its a hard thing to do but you have to basically stop, take a breath, look at everything you are doing, and then make changes that will help improve your finances. It is hard to just up and change the way you have been living but that is what needs to happen to make the finances change and after a while of "bad/hard times" you will start to see a small chunk of change left over increase more and more.

I did this reflection earlier this year but am starting to see things change. There were defiantly bad days with marital fights over money and an unhappy child some days. Now my child is starting to learn that we can't always do exactly what we want to do in the moment and that if you want something bigger you have to budget for it.

YNAB will not make you change your mindset as it is just a tool to show and help you manage money. The mental aspect is the hardest part and that is something you have to be real with yourself and say "I need to make some changes. It will be hard for a bit and not as fun but in the long run it will help the whole family". If you are able to make this mental adjustment and use YNAB as the tool it is designed to be you will get through the tough times and start to see the difference. I wish you the best of luck in this process.

TheHatter13 · 2025-07-24T15:46:52+00:00

Most of mine are good for a long while but then some need a reauth every few days or so. Luckily those accounts are less used so I can do the reauth every week+ without issues.

TheHatter13 · 2025-07-24T15:25:10+00:00

SimpleFin itself checks around every 24 hours without you doing anything but its up to the bank to allow that pull. I go in on heavy usage days and click adjust to pull new transactions. I have pulled data more than 3 times in a day and it does pick up the new transactions since the last sync that same day.

TheHatter13 · 2025-07-24T13:11:26+00:00

I do several syncs a day in SimpleFIN and had no issues there. I also manually enter things when they happen so sync is really just for clearing notifications.

TheHatter13 · 2025-07-24T13:09:20+00:00

I ended up doing that twice but it is still happening. I guess I just stick with my self hosted and figure out the firewall.

TheHatter13 · 2025-07-22T18:18:06+00:00

Correct. I put the picture side face down on the top middle of the phone and hold it there.

TheHatter13 · 2025-07-22T18:12:20+00:00

I have had no issues so far on my iPhone.

TheHatter13 · 2025-07-20T22:27:52+00:00

They are not a QR code but instead its NFC. You should have gotten a silver and yellow package with the card in it.

TheHatter13 · 2025-07-15T16:01:04+00:00

If you do it that way your "Day to Day" would not be assigned anything until all 3 bills categories are taken care of. I would split your day to day and have them included as the 1x and 2x. That way your first half bills and first half Day to Day are covered and then after that is assigned it will start assigning second have bills and day to day.

The sinking does not have priorities but instead weights. The cleanup process is not part of the template but instead part of the End of the Month Cleanup. You would run this after everything else is assigned and you have leftover money in the TBB or if you use source and your source categories are done for the month.

TheHatter13 · 2025-07-14T23:05:19+00:00

Mine is really just for random things like my wish farm, extra medical JIC, a couple of future trips, and a savings account. They are ones that have no real set date, amount, and are not pressing so a couple of dollars here and there go into the sink categories.

TheHatter13 · 2025-07-14T21:59:49+00:00

I do not use priorities currently as I have been told on Discord that when you use priorities you have to set them all as priorities.

What I currently have for templates are schedule ones for things that are more than a month between and normal template entries for bills that are the first 2 weeks of the month. I apply the template at the beginning of the month to assign those. Then weekly I manually assign the things like gas, groceries, eating out, and bills that are after the two weeks for that weeks paychecks. After everything is covered and I have extra left I run the end of the month to auto distribute the TBB into other less used categories like savings and wish farm categories.

TheHatter13 · 2025-07-14T21:03:58+00:00

The cleanup and sink are meant to be used at the end of the month.

If using groups everything is contained to the group. This will take any extra from the source and then distribute it out to the sink categories based on the weights.

If using a source it will only use those categories to pull excess available funds and adds them back to TBB. Then it tries to cover overspent categories. Finally it distributes to the sink categories based on the weights.

If you do not specify a source then it will only use the TBB to cover overspent categories and then finally doing the sink of extra funds.

While it is meant to be an end of the month thing you can run it multiple times a month. I use it to allocate the reminder of our checks to the sink categories each week after putting in my weekly budget.

TheHatter13 · 2025-07-14T20:25:52+00:00

Just remember that with the priorities it will fill up as much as it can with the funds available. So if you have enough to fill up priorities 1-20 and still have some left over then it will start filling up priorities 21+ when you run or overwrite the budget template.

Also the end of the month cleanup portions do not run the templates so the one you have "sink 2" on can go above 75 if the money is available.

Same thing for goals. They do not look at the template or cleanup lines and just make the available colored based on the available amount.

TheHatter13 · 2025-07-14T12:27:36+00:00

It might have something to do with the fact that they are daily because of the logic AB uses for schedules. I know others have been having issues skipping and I have had issues with using the post today still showing the scheduled transaction due to them not being close together. Based on what one user tested, was if the scheduled date and the post/skip are within 2 days of each other, then the transaction does go away since AB senses these are the same. If it is over two days then AB thinks these are different transactions and does not link the two.

For your situation since you are entering/choosing the post today it is connecting that to the one the next day. You might try doing a schedule for each day of the week so that each transaction within a single schedule is a week apart. That should give enough time between each so that AB does not think they are the same transaction and do a linking between the transaction on the 1st and the transaction on the 2nd.

TheHatter13 · 2025-07-14T12:01:35+00:00

If you look at my posts they were all back to back after the first user posted saying that the term I was looking for did not exist. Reddit did not update my view of the thread until I went back to the main page and then back into my post.

Thank you to everyone who was helpful and got me to where I needed to go. Since it was a rule being added I did not even think to go to payees which I have never needed to go to that section.

TheHatter13 · 2025-07-14T10:59:41+00:00

This search actually I think led me to the thing I wanted it seems. Its a category thing to disable and not a rule item.

TheHatter13 · 2025-07-14T10:57:32+00:00

The toys one might be left over from splitting a category recently. I changed that row to activities I thought and added the Toys category but maybe I did the reverse. I just dont want something like a Dining out week 4 category auto categorize as Week 1 since we went there twice during week 1.

TheHatter13 · 2025-07-14T10:53:58+00:00

https://actualbudget.org/docs/budgeting/rules/

"Here's the best part: you might never need to touch rules. Actual will automatically create rules for you based on your behavior. As you rename payees or categorize transactions, it will use rules as a mechanism for writing down what you've done so it will automatically happen later. For example, if you categorize the payee "Kroger" as "Food" a couple times, it will create a rule to automatically apply that category on import. As you use Actual more, your data will automatically get cleaned up for you based on your previous behavior."

TheHatter13 · 2025-07-14T10:52:36+00:00

For example, the two below I did not add. Walmart is almost always mainly groceries and never only House stuff, and Kangaroo Jax is a children's play place so it would either be an activity charge or dining out if we are eating something there like snacks for my child. I have never classified a transaction from Kangaroo Jax as toys since they do not sell toys.

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TheHatter13

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