Handling a reversed charge in YNAB

I visited a friend in New York over the weekend and at the end sent her $145 via Venmo, reimbursing her for my part of a couple of dinners out. To my surprise, Venmo took the money out of my bank account twice. Before I had a chance to contact my bank, I had a notification from Venmo about the error and a promise that the extra $145 they’d taken would be refunded.

Sometimes it’s hard to know what to do with these types of transactions in YNAB. It’s even more complicated when the reimbursements take in a money other the money they were first entered into YNAB. But let me show what I did in this simple Venmo scenario.

I categorized the first $145 Venmo transaction in the appropriate category, “Just for Fun: NYC trip.” I categorized this second transaction (the duplicate) in a category called “To be reimbursed (in-out),” with a note in the memo field that it was a duplicate transaction that will be refunded. Here’s how that looked in my checking account register this morning after the reversal had come through:

And here’s how it looked in my budget after the duplicate was categorized (but before the reversal was):

When the deposit came into my bank from Venmo, I simply categorized it as To be reimbursed (in-out):

And this is how it looked in my budget after the reimbursement was categorized. It’s a little surprising because it looks like nothing happened at all.

But when I click on the $0.00 in the Activity (middle) column, the in-out transactions are revealed:

This type of transaction is easy to do once you understand it. Because I knew a refund was coming soon, I let the $145 sit in the account overspent with a red bubble (which I usually hate). If I had thought the charge wasn’t going to be refunded before the end of the month, I would have moved money from another category to cover the overspending so that money wouldn’t be taken from next month’s Ready to Assign. In that scenario, once the refund came in, I would have categorized it to the category the money was taken from.

It’s worth noting that if this were a duplicate charge on a credit card that was reversed, I would have handled it the same way, categorizing the transaction into the To be reimbursed (in-out) category and then categorizing the credit on the credit card (an inflow) to the same category.

I hope this is helpful!