Actual Budget is a powerful and open-source tool for managing personal finances. In this article - I recount my personal experience transitioning from YNAB to Actual and how I helped to build the community of volunteers. We also briefly talk about plans for 2025 and I address some frequent statements seen on the internet.

The release has the following notable improvements:

• Dashboards (also called Reports) officially released as first-party feature (for details see: https://actualbudget.org/docs/tour/reports)
• Tracking budget officially released as first-party feature (for details see https://actualbudget.org/docs/getting-started/tracking-budget)
• New summary report card type
• Batch sync for SimpleFin accounts

The release has the following notable improvements:

• Optimizations to some SimpleFIN API calls
• Experimental support for setting the upcoming schedule duration
• Many improvements to the experimental dashboards feature
• Experimental templating support in rules

The primary intent of this release is to patch a performance regression in user preferences that can cause faulty views displayed in accounts or for goal templates.

The release has the following notable improvements:

• SimpleFIN officially released as first-party feature
• Color themes: ability to set "system default" color theme
• Mobile: button to view uncategorized transactions
• Privacy mode: instead of blurring use an unintelligible font
• Experimental dashboards: ability to save cash-flow, net-worth and spending report filters and date-ranges.

Important notice about the @actual-app/api package: starting from this release the versioning strategy of the API package will align with the web & server: {year}.{month}.{patch-version}.

The release has the following notable improvements:

• mobile: long-press transactions to reveal more actions
• transactions table: show imported payee on hover of payee column
• filtering: ability to filter by "has tags" conditions
• budgets: highlight current month
• imports: ability to skip heading lines
• experimental: custom report homepage (dashboards)

The release has the following notable improvements:

• ability to favorite payees
• most used and favorite payees appear at the top of the payee autocomplete results
• resizable side navigation
• experimental goal templates: long term goal template support
• experimental spending report: adding last month as an option for the primary graph

The release has the following notable improvements:

• Custom reports are officially released
• Splits in rules are officially released
• Tags support for transactions (use #tags in notes)
• Transactions: allow merging/un-merging multiple transactions
• Show account notes in sidebar (on hover)

Hello budgeters!

This is the start of the series Actual Versus! Today we will be comparing Actual Budget to YNAB (You Need a Budget).

YNAB is the longstanding heavyweight in the envelope budgeting space. It was one of the originals. Lets see how Actual stacks up!

The release has the following notable improvements:

• API: ability to run 3rd party bank-sync (GoCardless, SimpleFin) programmatically
• API: methods for working with rules
• Add option to authenticate with HTTP header - X-ACTUAL-PASSWORD
• Add option to import CAMT.053 based XML files
• (Experimental) monthly spending report - please report feedback here