Focused Views are a dream come true!

YNAB recently launched its Focused Views, which allow users to select categories that they’d like to include in a single view of their budget. It solves one of the most difficult aspects of YNAB for me, which is finding the categories I need at any given time in my somewhat unwieldy budget.

If you noticed them already, on the desktop version of the YNAB software, you’ll see buttons reading All, Underfunded, Overfunded, and Money Available. Click on them and see what happens! Even better, you can create your own, customized focused views by clicking on the icon to the right with blue horizontal lines.

I like having a granular budget with lots of individual categories. I always organized my budget using Category Groups. But with Focused Views, Category Groups become less important, because you can filter categories into customized groups available at the click of a button. It allows you to see your categories in a variety of ways.

For example, you could have all your monthly bills in a category group, but create a view for all your categories related to a topic. If you wanted to see all your transportation expenses together in one click, no matter what category group they’re in, you would just create a transportation custom view. I created a custom view for the categories related to my poodle, Bix, which were spread among a few groups. I also created one for those categories I look to first if I need to move money to cover overspending. (I call it WAM cats, for Whack-A-Mole.)

Here’s what my Bix view looks like today:

There are so many ways to use Focused Views and I can’t wait to explore it more. I can see creating a custom view for husband that just contains the categories that interest him, since he’s not as into budgeting as I am.

Here’s a great YNAB video that gives you a quick overview of Focused Views, which are currently available only for the web version, but they’re working on rolling them out on the mobile app. If you prefer to read (rather than watch a video), here’s an introduction to Focused Views on the YNAB website.

Focused Views solves problems I didn’t even know I had. I’ve loved YNAB for years, but this is going to make it easy to love it even more!