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Comment by drewpc | Hacker News Reader

I'm in the same boat. In a world before I found Simple, a spreadsheet with all of my monthly expenses and totals for each account transfer I needed to do was good enough. I can't get myself to see the additional value of mvelopes.com. Simple, however, was a game changer for me. Sad.

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What’s the main difference between Simple and YNAB? I’m a YNAB user but have never used Simple. You say that you can’t see the extra value of mvelopes (and I assume YNAB) but if you don’t have Simple then why is YNAB not good enough?

I'm not familiar with how YNAB ingests transaction data, but I seem to remember when I looked at it last that at least some transactions have to be logged manually.

If you used Simple pretty much exclusively you wouldn't have to manually enter any transactions, although you might occasionally have to categorize things.

The obvious exception would be cash transactions, which I don't believe Simple ever tracked in any detail.

It’s all automatic. You do have to approve and categorize transactions though. But the import is automatic if you’re using a major bank.

not for all major banks, mine (usaa) forces 2fa which broke ynab and made it useable because i don't want to do data entry for every transaction.

They might have fixed this. They switched to using plaid for external accounts this year, and I was able to add several banks which had 2FA earlier today.

I ran into this for alliant. Reach out to YNAB support, they adjust your account supposedly to not use Plaid for instances like MFA being enabled. It wasn't clear if its an all or nothing deal though for all your accounts to use Plaid or not.

USAA works fine for me. It just asks you to enter the token during login.

EDIT: and I think it migrated to OAuth anyways so no more tokens

It's been said elsewhere but just in case, they recently started using different import provider(s) and many accounts that were broken before now work great, including MFA ones.

I have both, and since adopting YNAB, my Simple budgets have been redundant and abandoned. Simple offered nothing that YNAB doesn;t, other than direct actions on your account (transfers, etc). That was far outweighed by YNAB's ability to manage multiple accounts, in particular their credit card balance & payment management.

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