Awesome

Overview

For decades I have been a financial planning fanatic. Going back to Quicken for DOS in the late 80s, it's been a crazy fun passion of mine and now with YNAB, even more so.

However, my very busy professional wife doesn't share the same love of financial management. She's frugal, but loses interest quickly when we start going over spreadsheets and reports. She won't install YNAB and even if she did, she just wouldn't take the time to look at the data. It's not that she doesn't care, it's just that she trusts me to handle the finances and to inform her when there are concerns.

There are times, though, when she does pop in to look at finances. These moments can be a bit stressful because she hasn't been involved. And when you're not plugged in consistently, you don't have context around the financial situation and that can cause some distress if you have different expectations.

That's why I wrote ynab-a-day. It's a simple script that I can run once a day and it will send a brief snapshot of our finances to a chat channel using the data from YNAB. Right now it's integrated with Synology Chat using a webhook, but it's super-simple to add additional integration to other messaging solutions.

Philosophy

The goals of this project for my significant other:

• Provide complete transparency into all of our finances on a daily basis
• Show all of our account balances
• Highlight specific categories that we should be monitoring
• Show all transactions in the past 24 hours across all accounts (in progress)
• Allow for customization presentation of the data (in progress)
• Provide this data via Synology Chat, Slack or other messaging solution that allows for non-intrusive multiple channels, so that it doesn't get annoying

Sample Report

The report is purposely simplistic and mininimal, but thorough. The goal is to provide the information in a very high-level format so it can be glanced at quickly without having to pore over 50 different categories and line items.

----- Mon, Jan 21 -----
NET WORTH: $399,000.00

otherAsset: $300,000.00
  House: $100,000.00
  Ford Pinto Asset: $100,000.00
  401K: $100,000.00

otherLiability: -$100,000.00
  Mortgage: -$50,000.00
  Ford Pinto: -$50,000.00

savings: $100,000.00
  Savings: $100,000.00

checking: $100,000.00
  Checking: $100,000.00

creditCard: -$1,000.00
  Woolworth's Card: -$1,000.00

---- SPENDING ----
Mobile Phones: $100.00
Groceries: $200.00
Dining Out: $75.00

Installation

1. Clone this repo:

   $ git clone https://github.com/troylar/ynab-a-day.git
   $ cd ynab-a-day
   $ npm install

2. Create an API token

3. Create a new config file:

    $ cp ./config/default.js.example ./config/default.js

4. Modify the config file you just created.

   • Replace <YNAB API Key> with your key you just created in step #2
   • Replace the accounts section with a list of all the accounts you want to display
   • Replace the categories section with a list of all the categories you want to display
   • If you have Synology Chat, create a webhook and replace <Webhook>, or just take this out and add your own

5. Run the report

    $ node ./src/index.js

Next Steps

I would love for others to add additional integrations (Slack, HipChat, etc.). The value here is to allow significant others to have visibility without being email-spammed or overwhelmed with notifications.