Accounts and their kinds

There are no monthly budgets. Instead every account has a kind, worked out from its path by a table of rules in the server’s configuration. The first matching rule wins.

• assets:bank:checking is money.
• assets:bank:checking:insurance is a reserve (a fund) inside that bank account.
• assets:bank:checking:card-visa is a card’s reserve.
• assets:receivable:<person> and liabilities:payable:<person> are what a person owes you and what you owe them.
• liabilities:credit-card:visa is a card; liabilities:loans:* and liabilities:mortgage:* are loans.
• Other kinds are non-liquid, income and expense.

Friendly names

Tags on an account give friendly names: ynab-account: for accounts and ynab-envelope: for categories. An account’s kind never comes from a tag.

Warnings

An account no rule matches, an overdrawn reserve or a card reserve that does not match its card produces a warning on Overview with the one action that fixes it. A warning never blocks a write.

Balances, homes and physical accounts

An account’s exclusive balance includes only its own postings; its inclusive balance adds subaccounts. For a money account the exclusive balance is free money and the inclusive balance is the bank balance. Funds and card reserves have a home money account.

Synthetic is a separate property from account kind. Accounts default to real; reserves default to synthetic. physical_home identifies the real account holding the money. Converting an account’s real/synthetic type is a rewrite; it does not move money or change the account’s kind. Never use it to disguise a bank transfer.

• Glossary and accounting signs
• Server configuration and operations