Shared Accounts/Budgets
C
Casey Elliott
For me, this function is crucial. In my situation, I just need it to be read only for my wife. I handle all of the specifics with the budget and finances, but she is responsible for the spending in specific categories, groceries for example. I would need her to have read only access to know how much money she has left in the categories she is responsible for so she keeps spending in check for those categories.
Igor
Karis can you give some more details of what you'd like your partner to be able to change in the budget? You can just say "copy YNAB", and I'll go check out what they have. If you have something you'd like different than them, let me know.
Would you want your partner to be able to see all transactions/categories/etc.? Edit them as if they were you? Would both you and your partner be willing to pay the subscription price, or would one person be the account holder and the other partner can only interact with the account holder's budget (meaning only one person subscribes).
Thanks for this feedback 🫡
M
Marcos
Igor
I can see two scenarios here. One for “budgeting as one”, where two people would share the same budget and all the changes would be centralized. This is the same as sharing a password for example, but it would be good to have a separate subscription model for this.
But for my use case, what would make most sense is sharing certain budgets (or groups) with another person.
Assuming both would have a separate subscription, it’d be perfect to have this scenario:
In my account:
Household spending (shared)
- Rent
- Groceries
Personal
- Sports
- Clothes
In the other person account:
Household spending (shared)
- Rent
- Groceries
Personal
- Transport
- College Loan
Once one makes change to a shared budget, it would reflect on the other person’s account.
But I assume this is not the easiest of the features to implement. :)
Igor
Marcos: My brain hurts thinking of a way to implement this 🧠🔥
I have an immediate question that may not effect you or others using manual transactions, but those of us with automatic import, how will this work?
A transaction from the local grocery store comes in.
Do both users get a notification? I think yes.
They both open their phones to categorize the transaction. The person who went to the store bought a sandwich, so they want to categorize this as a Dining Out category (which may or may not be shared with the other person), and the other person thinks this is groceries so they categorize it as such.
... my brain ...
For manual transactions, there is a similar problem. What if we don't agree with the categorization of a transaction? I may put the transaction in one category, and you in another (assuming this happens at the same time in the real world). Does whoever saved the transaction last win?
Anyway, I like where you're going with this. And I like that you're throwing out suggestions while understanding the complexity of them. That makes it easier for me when I know you know how hard it is.
M
Marcos
Igor
Yeah. I was thinking about that when I suggested. I know how weird this would be. But for couples, this system would be super interesting, no matter how it gets implemented.
I think for imports, it’d be up to whoever makes the latest change to the transaction. This would be some sort of migration transaction. I’m assuming that this is what YNAB does (by looking at their API). I am a developer myself, so I know this introduces some racing condition, but not necessarily a problem.
About the import vs manual notifications and categorization, I think this is up to the people using. I think people wouldn’t use sharing budgets with import function on their personal accounts. Maybe a joint account, but that’s just speculation from my side.