I'm still on v4, it works great and I had to pay for it once. I know the model is subscriptions these days and $7/mo ($84/annual purchase) really is nothing in the big picture but it still bugs me. Looking through their release notes it doesn't appear that there has been major improvements in the budgeting aspect of the software. If you've used v4 is it worth it?
I used v4 back in 2012-2013 (when I was in college). They switched to nYNAB a year or so after, and I hated that everything was "in the cloud" and there was an option to "automatically import transactions from my bank account." I was like, what? I thought YNAB was about manually tracking my balances so I always knew what was going on.
But I got back into budgeting in mid 2018, and I actually love all of those features. imo the $7/mo I pay is well worth the auto-transactions, auto-syncing across all devices without dropbox, ability to link several different accounts (my checking acct is with a small local credit union, I have a brokerage account, a personal loan I'm paying down, etc.).
I'd go check the YNAB forums, there's a lot of v4 users who really hate the cloud version. I tried to switch and gave it up for two reasons:
- Import from v4 is super broken for credit card accounts and I ended up with weird positive balances that don't add up based on any combination of transactions. Forum advice was "start over".
- You cannot tag income as "available for next month", instead all income must be immediately budgeted. Which is different than the old YNAB advice of being a month ahead. Forum advice is to earmark it a special category then fix it when the next month lands (https://support.youneedabudget.com/t/63pgpp/budget-using-onl...).
- No side-by-side month view. You can only view one month at a time.
The differences were too much for me and the import was so borked that I immediately gave up and stuck with v4.
I don't think your 2nd bullet is completely true, although I don't think it's the same as how it worked in v4.
You can receive income in January, then switch to February and allocate it to a category. When you switch back to January, it will not show that money in your To Be Budgeted total. So you can zero out January while having the next month already budgeted for.
My system is to switch to the next month, select all categories, then click the "Budgeted Last Month" button to automatically apply my previous budget to that month. Then I switch back to the current month and fix any underfunded categories and allocate any overflows to get the balance down to zero.
Longtime YNAB user here. It was rough moving to nYNAB at first, and I missed features for awhile. It's generally caught up and surpassed YNAB 4 in most respects. Things I still miss: the red right arrow (good reason to abandon it, but I still liked it), and being able to see three months side-by-side. Starting over occasionally is not a bad thing, IMO, and I did a fresh start with nYNAB. I created a "Next Month's Income" category, and use it exactly like YNAB 4; I don't budget beyond the current month. It woekd just fine that way. I generally ignore "Age of Money", which took over as the "Live on Last Month's Income" rule, and still follow the latter.
YNABaaS brings automatic integrations to the table and the 'sync' story is, obviously, much easier since it doesn't involve Dropbox. That's all I noticed. I did a trial and just was not impressed. In my opinion, using the SaaS version when you own the desktop software should get you a charity write-off.
What does bug me is being forced to store all my data on their servers. I'm sticking to v4 until I'm forced onto something else (or I build my own replacement)
