YNAB 4 vs nYNAB vs Excel: Why I Came Back to YNAB (2026 Update)

Update October 2026: I’m back on YNAB. In November 2021 I added a note to this post saying I’d quit. That note is outdated now, so I rewrote the whole thing. The original YNAB 4 vs nYNAB comparison from 2020 is still below, with a few corrections where time proved me wrong.

Back in May 2020 I had a decision to make. YNAB (short for You Need A Budget) had stopped supporting YNAB 4 on 31 October 2019, and I had been an avid user of the tool for over 7 years. So I compared YNAB 4 vs nYNAB (the new, subscription-based YNAB) vs a good old Excel sheet, and I picked nYNAB. That lasted about a year and a half. Then I quit. And now I’m back. So this post is a bit of a confession too 😄 Oh and of course the two letter word helped with this decision.

Why I quit YNAB in 2021

Two main reasons, really, neither of which is really anything special.

1. Keeping every transaction neat in YNAB takes a bit of effort every week, and I simply didn’t have it. In 2022 I went freelance and the blog went quiet for a long time too, so I wasn’t exactly sitting around with hours to spare. In 2020 I even wrote that I didn’t need budgeting functionality that much because I kept strict control over my finances. Famous last words.
2. And this was the real annoyance: YNAB was built for American banks. In 2020 I wrote that direct import was “not really useful for Europeans”. YNAB launched European imports (via TrueLayer) at the end of November 2021, the very month I left, but support for Belgian banks was limited. Most transactions still meant exporting a file or typing them in by hand. On top of that, YNAB raised its prices in November 2021, and paying more for a tool that barely talked to my banks felt silly. So I canceled.

Why I came back in 2026

A few things changed for YNAB over the years. For the better, I’d say.

• YNAB finally got decent support for European banks. In February 2025 they switched their European import to Plaid, with much broader coverage. Belgium is on the list of supported countries. Most of my current accounts now flow in on their own, which takes away most of the chore that made me quit.
• I have more time again, both for the blog and for my own finances.
• And the biggest one: kids. When I wrote the original post, I was a guy with a stable salary and no children. Today I’m a freelancer with two kids, and income that doesn’t arrive in neat monthly amounts. If you’ve read what raising a child in Belgium actually costs, you know kids aren’t exactly cheap. Keeping “strict control” without a tool doesn’t cut it anymore.
• Finally, I have to admit it’s also thanks to AI. In the past it was difficult to handle the long list of misalignments I had created or that naturally came due to a lack of automation in YNAB in the past and even now (for credit cards, as it’s not mandatory under PSD2). Now, I can use Claude code to create a simple automation to help me finally align all my bank statements that are now for the most part auto-synced (thank god for PSD2), and credit card statements that aren’t auto-synced (coming with PSD3, btw).

In the end, your savings rate is the number that decides when you get there, and you can’t steer a savings rate you don’t measure. In the end, budgeting is the boring part that pays for the exciting, investment part.

What YNAB still doesn’t import for a Belgian

Direct import fixed most of my current accounts. Unfortunately, it didn’t fix everything as I mentioned earlier.

My credit cards (a Beobank Extra Mastercard and an American Express Platinum card) are not covered, oh, and my investment accounts aren’t either. The investment accounts I can live with: I keep them as tracking accounts in YNAB, like I already did in 2020 (screenshot below). The credit cards are a different story, because that’s where a big chunk of the day-to-day spending happens.

YNAB does support file-based import. But my card statements come as PDFs, and I’ve done enough manual CSV imports in my life to know how that ends: duplicates, a missing month and a balance that’s off for no reason anyone can explain. They also support CSV, but the format has to be correct or you can screw up that as well (or it doesn’t even happen). In short, a decent chunk of my daily expenses were still a pain in the ass to handle. With two kids those daily expenses were a lot more in every sense of the word.

Filling the gap with a little help from an LLM

So I built my own tool. Five years ago, I would never have finished this as a side project. With an AI coding assistant doing a lot of the typing, the first version that read both cards was there at the end of June 2026, in a single day. Fixing everything I discovered afterwards took the rest of the summer (but more about that later).

What it does, in plain words:

• It reads my Beobank and Amex PDF statements.
• It checks that the transactions add up to the statement total, to the cent, and that this month’s opening balance matches last month’s closing balance. If that fails, nothing goes to YNAB.
• It removes anything that’s already in YNAB, so I don’t import the same coffee twice.
• It shows me exactly what it’s about to send before it sends anything.

And yes, it still went wrong. My older CSV imports had sometimes put a purchase and its foreign exchange fee on one line, while the tool (correctly) keeps them as two. At first the tool didn’t recognise those as the same purchase, and I ended up with almost €5,700 of duplicates in YNAB before I traced it back and fixed the matching. Lesson learned: the boring checks are the whole point, and you need more of them than you think.

The Amex history is now complete: 53 months, February 2022 to June 2026, without a single gap. My Beobank history has holes between April 2020 and early 2024 that I’ll probably never fill, because I haven’t been able to recover those statements. I can live with that.

Am I sharing the tool? Not for now. It’s built around my own cards and my own statements, and I’d rather not become the helpdesk for everyone’s Beobank PDFs 😉

YNAB 4 vs nYNAB: what I wrote in 2020

This is the comparison that most people still find this post for. I kept it, because if you’re still running YNAB 4 somewhere, these are the differences you’ll notice. One correction first: in 2020 I wrote that the new YNAB came out in 2019. It’s older than that. YNAB’s own transition guide dates from March 2016. 2019 was simply when YNAB 4 support ended.

The new YNAB is the same personal budgeting method, now as a subscription that works in the browser and on your phone. It’s still based on the envelope method: every euro gets a job.

Main changes

• Goals (now called Targets): this was the big one for me. It takes the work out of my head and puts it in the software. You budget forward, instead of using YNAB as an after-the-fact record of spending that already happened.
• Improved credit card payments: a dedicated Credit Card Payment category is added for every card. Buy something with the card and the budgeted money moves from the spending category to the card payment automatically.
• No more budgeting 3 months at a time: in 2020 this was a big negative for me. I liked planning months ahead with a stable income. YNAB’s logic is that you only budget money you actually have.
• Reports: I found them less clear than YNAB 4’s trend view, and pretty basic compared to the absolute freedom of Excel.

YNAB 4

New YNAB

Other changes

• Syncing: no more Dropbox, no more cross-platform headaches.
• Direct import: in 2020 I called this “not really useful for Europeans”. As you read above, that’s the part that changed the most.
• Colours: you see at a glance which categories are funded and which aren’t.

If you still have a YNAB 4 budget lying around, YNAB has a migration guide, and former YNAB 4 users get a 10% lifetime discount on the annual plan (according to their pricing page).

YNAB vs Excel: is a spreadsheet enough?

In 2020 I tried Excel for a while. I downloaded a pile of pre-made templates and they “worked”, but tweaking my own sheet gave me a feeling of dread instead of joy.

Excel’s advantage hasn’t changed: total freedom, no subscription, and you can put your investments, property and loans right next to your budget. Its weakness hasn’t changed either. Reconciling cleared and uncleared transactions in your own sheet is surprisingly fiddly, and if your partner ever needs to take over, good luck explaining your formulas.

It’s at the end of the day a spreadsheet and no amount of fancy styling and formula’s hides that fact. it’s why in the end I always gravitated back towards a dedicated tool such as YNAB. I did try a couple of other type of alternatives first.

Of the alternatives I looked at back then, Mint no longer exists: Intuit shut it down in March 2024. It’s a good reminder that free tools can disappear with your data.

Is YNAB worth the subscription in 2026?

In 2020 I asked if YNAB was worth “your 80 dollars a year”. Asking the same question now is hard, since the price has gone up. Today it’s $109 a year or $14.99 a month, and it’s priced in US dollars, so the euro amount fluctuates with the exchange rate, which, luckily for us in Europe, means it’s a bit cheaper.

The cancellation policy remains fair: you can cancel at any time and keep access until the end of the period you paid for.

So, would I recommend it? My answer from 2020 still stands; Give YNAB a try if:

• there’s too much month left at the end of your paycheck,
• you don’t know where your money goes,
• you spend all your money on things and don’t have enough left to buy food.

Already have your budget in order and happy with a spreadsheet? Then keep your spreadsheet. Honestly. It probably has become easier to use as well thanks to AI coding tools.

For me it’s a bit different now. With two kids, freelance income and a FIRE goal, I want every euro to have a job before it’s spent. Whether I’ll still be writing this in another five years, I don’t know. I’ve been wrong on this page before.

How about you? Are you on YNAB, a Belgian app, or are you an Excel wizard who laughs at all of this? And if you found a way to get Belgian credit cards into YNAB without writing code, please tell me in the comments.

If you want to try YNAB after reading this, you can use my referral link. You get 6 weeks to try it instead of 34 days, and if you subscribe, I get a free month.

This post contains a referral link. If you sign up through it and subscribe, I get a free month. It doesn’t change what I think of YNAB.