Bank Sync for YNAB has shut down: how to keep syncing your Australian bank to YNAB

Bank Sync for YNAB (banksyncforynab.com) closed on 30 November 2025. If you used it, your transactions stopped flowing into YNAB a few months ago and you're probably looking for a replacement.

This is a quick guide to your options as an Australian YNAB user.

What happened to Bank Sync for YNAB

Bank Sync for YNAB was a small Australian service that pushed local bank transactions into YNAB automatically. It supported around 40 Australian financial institutions and was a popular pick for AU-based YNAB users who didn't want to do manual imports.

In late 2025 the team announced they couldn't make the service sustainable long term and would wind it down on 30 November 2025. Banking data stored on their systems was deleted at shutdown. Anything already synced into YNAB stayed there, but no new transactions arrived after that date.

Closing a small bootstrapped product is a hard call to make. If you're reading this, you need a replacement.

Your options

YNAB doesn't support direct bank feeds for Australian institutions, so any "automatic" sync into an AU YNAB budget has to bridge that gap somehow. There are three rough approaches.

The first is manual CSV or OFX imports. You download a transaction file from your bank each week and upload it to YNAB. It's free and it works, but in practice almost everyone who tries this drifts away from their budget within a few weeks because the friction is too high.

The second is a screen-scraping aggregator: a service that logs into your internet banking using credentials you hand over, then reads transactions off the page. A few of the older AU-to-YNAB services were built this way. It's increasingly fragile (Australian banks are rolling out mandatory MFA, which screen scrapers can't satisfy), it conflicts with most banks' terms and conditions, and the Australian Government has formally described the practice as "fundamentally unsafe". We don't recommend it.

The third is Open Banking via the Consumer Data Right. The CDR is the framework built specifically to replace screen scraping. You authenticate at your bank's own website, your bank issues a scoped, time-limited token to an accredited third party, and that token is used to read your transactions. Your password never leaves your bank. This is how Redbark works.

Switching to Redbark

Redbark pulls your bank transactions through Fiskil, an ACCC-accredited Open Banking data recipient, and pushes them into YNAB. It supports 100+ Australian institutions including ANZ, CommBank, NAB, Westpac, and most smaller banks and credit unions.

Setup takes a few minutes:

1. Sign up at app.redbark.co (7-day free trial, no card required).
2. Click Add Connection, choose Australian Banks, pick your bank, and grant CDR consent on the Fiskil page.
3. Click Add Destination, choose You Need a Budget, and authorise it through YNAB's standard OAuth flow.
4. Click Add Sync to map each bank account to a YNAB account, and pick how far back you want to backfill.

From there transactions sync in the background. There's a longer walkthrough with screenshots in How to Sync Australian Banks with You Need a Budget.

A few things to know coming from Bank Sync for YNAB. You re-authenticate at your bank, not at Redbark, so your banking password is never typed into our app or Fiskil's. CDR consent lasts up to 12 months and shows up on a consent dashboard inside your bank's app, where you can revoke it at any time without contacting us; we email you 90 days before it expires. Any transactions Bank Sync for YNAB already pushed into YNAB stay there, so when you set up the sync you can backfill from the date Bank Sync for YNAB stopped working without creating duplicates.

After the trial, plans start at A$10/mo billed annually or A$12/mo billed monthly. Full details on the pricing page.

If you run into anything, reach out at support@redbark.co.