To see a list of all your existing YNAB connections, or to create a new one, head to YNAB in the Synci dashboard. It’s pinned under Integrations in the sidebar by default, and you can always find it on the All integrations page.

Connecting to YNAB

Click the New connection button to start. In the Connect to YNAB dialog, you can give the connection an optional name, which helps if you connect more than one YNAB account.

Click Connect. You will be redirected to YNAB for authorization. If you’re not already logged into YNAB, you must log in before authorizing the connection.

Authorize access

Grant Synci access to your YNAB plans and accounts by clicking the “Authorize” button.

Once authorization is complete, you will be redirected back to Synci, and we will immediately begin syncing available budgets (plans) and budget accounts.

Budgets synced

When the sync is done, Synci shows Budgets synced, and your budgets appear on the connection’s page. After that, Synci refreshes your budgets and budget accounts from YNAB once a week.

Linking an account

Nothing is sent to YNAB until you link one of your Synci accounts to a YNAB budget account. Open the budget account in Synci and go to its Linked Accounts tab, or start from your bank, brokerage or crypto account: Linking accounts to destinations

Each link sends Transactions only, Transactions & balance or Balance only. Bank accounts default to Transactions only; brokerage and crypto accounts default to Transactions & balance.

How transactions arrive in YNAB

• The payee comes from the transaction’s mapped payee in Synci (up to 199 characters), and the memo from its mapped description (up to 499 characters).

• Booked transactions arrive as cleared, and pending ones as uncleared. When a pending transaction is booked, Synci updates it in YNAB according to the link’s When transactions become booked settings.

• Each transaction’s import ID is its Synci transaction ID, so YNAB rejects duplicates. A rejected duplicate shows as failed in the link’s transfer logs.

• Transactions dated in the future are added as one-time scheduled transactions.

• Synci doesn’t set a category by default. To set one, attach an Only on the way out rule to the linked account and pick from your YNAB categories.

• For links set to Transactions & balance or Balance only, Synci keeps the YNAB account’s balance in line with your account by adding a cleared Synci balance adjustment transaction for the difference, at most once a day.

What data is Synci getting from YNAB?

You may have noticed you’re granting Synci a lot of permissions when authorizing the connection. Frankly, it’s more than we need. Currently, YNAB doesn’t support a more narrow access scope than the one you see in the screenshot above. It’s either read or write, and we need write access to transfer transactions to your budget accounts.

At the time of writing, this is the data we store from YNAB:

• YNAB account ID

• Budgets/Plans

• Budget accounts, including their balances (stored encrypted)

To refresh these, Synci reads your budgets and budget accounts from YNAB, but it only keeps the items above. Synci also reads some YNAB data without storing it:

• Categories, when you pick a category for a rule. They’re kept in a temporary cache for up to a day and never saved to Synci’s database.

• Transactions Synci created, when it needs to update one after a pending transaction is booked.

When you delete a YNAB connection, budget, or account in Synci, the data is permanently deleted from our servers. You can always create a new YNAB connection if you’ve changed your mind.