Evaluate and Display Your Accounting Data

Programming Snapshot – YNAB

© Lead Image © bowie15, 123RF.com

© Lead Image © bowie15, 123RF.com

Article from Issue 303/2026
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Mike Schilli analyzes the accounting data exported from the YNAB financial tool to discover where his hard-earned money is going.

No matter whether you use Quicken, Mint, or the more open-friendly (but commercial) You Need A Budget (YNAB), the path to financial success relies on you keeping a close eye on your income and expenses. I already touched on this topic in a previous column [1], where I looked at a terminal UI in Go for checking my current financial reserve levels. In this issue, the focus shifts to evaluating where I spend my hard-earned cash and on what.

Because YNAB portrays itself as open, it also lets you export (Figure 1) all the data you have entered to date in CSV format (Figure 2). In the year and a half that I have been using YNAB, I have accumulated a total of 1,976 entries (Figure 3) – a gold mine for statistical analysis.

Figure 1: YNAB lets you export all your data entries …

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