ynab-api

The YNAB API Management skill provides a robust command-line interface for interacting with your You Need A Budget (YNAB) data. Designed for users who want to move beyond manual entry, this skill leverages curl and jq to perform programmatic budget operations directly from your terminal or AI agent environment. It is ideal for personal finance enthusiasts, power users who need to track spending across multiple accounts, and anyone looking to integrate automated financial summaries into their daily workflow. Whether you need to log transactions, analyze monthly spending patterns, or keep tabs on your Age of Money, this tool offers a structured way to maintain your financial health.

• Automated reporting including daily spending summaries, monthly budget progress, and month-over-month comparisons.

• Transaction management capabilities: create transactions, handle split categories, and perform payee searches to maintain categorical consistency.

• Financial insights: monitor category goal progress, track upcoming bills, and receive alerts for overspending or low budget status.

• Smart transfer handling: utilizes transfer_payee_id to ensure money movements between accounts are correctly categorized and linked in the YNAB ledger.

• Intelligent error handling: features a retry mechanism for 401 and 429 API errors, preventing common rate-limiting issues from interrupting user experience.

• Configuration: Requires YNAB_API_KEY and YNAB_BUDGET_ID, with optional support for a monthly spending target set via environment variables or a local config.json file.

• Data precision: All monetary values are processed in milliunits (10.00 represented as 10000); ensure multipliers are used correctly when interacting with the API.

• Operational discipline: Always perform a search for existing transactions or payees before adding new entries to prevent duplicates and keep reports clean.

• Performance: The API enforces strict rate limits (approx. 200 requests/hour); use caching for bulk data and avoid aggressive polling.

• Context awareness: When interpreting data from daily-spending-report.sh, the agent acts as a financial analyst, translating raw metrics into natural, actionable advice for the user.