How to Sync Australian Banks with YNAB

Why YNAB

YNAB (You Need A Budget) is the budgeting app most people land on once they get serious about it. It works on a simple idea: give every dollar a job. But if you're in Australia, you've hit the same wall everyone else has. YNAB doesn't support direct bank imports for Australian institutions.

That means you're stuck manually importing transactions. Download a CSV or OFX from your bank, upload it to YNAB, clean up any duplicates, repeat every few days. It works, but it's tedious enough that most people stop doing it after a couple of weeks and end up budgeting blind.

Redbark automates the import. You connect your Australian bank account, connect YNAB, and transactions show up there without you doing anything.

What you need before starting

• An Australian bank account with one of the 100+ supported institutions (ANZ, CommBank, NAB, Westpac, and most smaller banks and credit unions)
• A YNAB account with at least one plan and one account set up
• A Redbark account (7-day free trial, no credit card required)

If you don't have accounts set up in YNAB yet, create them first. You'll need at least one account in your plan for each bank account you want to sync. For example, a "Checking" account for your transaction account and a "Credit Card" account for your Visa.

Connecting your bank

When you sign up and hit the dashboard, the first thing you'll do is add a connection. Click "Add Connection" and choose Australian Banks.

This takes you to Fiskil's consent screen, where you select your bank, log in with your banking credentials, and grant consent for Redbark to access your account and transaction data.

Fiskil is accredited under the Consumer Data Right (CDR). That accreditation means they've passed the ACCC's assessment for handling banking data, and your bank is legally required to share your data with them when you consent.

The whole thing takes about a minute. Once you're redirected back to Redbark, your accounts will appear in the dashboard. They'll show as syncing for a few seconds while Fiskil loads your transaction history, then switch to available.

CDR consent lasts up to 12 months. Redbark sends you an email about 90 days before expiry so you can re-consent if you want to keep syncing.

Connecting YNAB

Next, you add YNAB as a destination. Head to the Destinations page and click "Add Destination", then choose YNAB.

This starts a standard OAuth flow. You'll be redirected to YNAB's website where you log in and authorise Redbark to access your plans and create transactions.

Once you approve, you're redirected back to Redbark to finish setting up the destination. You'll pick which YNAB plan to use. If you have multiple plans (say, a personal one and a shared household one), you pick the one you want transactions flowing into. Account selection happens later when you create a sync.

That's it for destination setup. You can always create additional YNAB destinations later if you want to sync to multiple plans.

Creating a sync

With your bank and YNAB connected, you create a sync. Click "Add Sync" from the syncs page and a wizard walks you through it.

Step 1: Pick your destination

Select YNAB as the destination type, then choose which YNAB destination you set up earlier. If you only have one, it's already selected.

Then pick the specific YNAB plan you want to sync to.

Step 2: Pick your bank accounts

Choose which bank accounts to include. They're grouped by institution, so if you have accounts at both CommBank and ING, you'll see them in separate sections. You can select as many as you want.

Step 3: Map bank accounts to YNAB accounts

This is where YNAB differs from destinations like Google Sheets. Instead of everything going to one place, you map each bank account to a specific YNAB account.

For example:

• Your CommBank transaction account → "Everyday Checking" in YNAB
• Your CommBank credit card → "Visa Credit Card" in YNAB
• Your ING savings → "Savings" in YNAB

The dropdown shows all open, on-budget accounts in your selected YNAB plan. If you don't see the account you need, create it in YNAB first and come back.

You can map multiple bank accounts to the same YNAB account if you want. Redbark will warn you that transactions will be merged, but it's a valid setup.

Step 4: Map categories (optional)

This step lets you map bank transaction categories to YNAB categories. Your bank categorises transactions into things like "Groceries", "Utilities", "Transport", and so on. If you want those to automatically land in the matching YNAB category, set up the mappings here.

Each bank category shows a dropdown with all the categories from your YNAB plan, grouped by category group. Map as many or as few as you like. Any unmapped categories will come through without a category in YNAB, and you can categorise them manually there or let YNAB's auto-categorisation handle it.

This is optional. If you prefer to categorise everything in YNAB yourself, skip it entirely.

Step 5: Choose your date range

Pick how far back to pull transaction history. On the free trial you can go back 3 months. On Pro, up to 7 years. This only applies to the initial sync. After that, new transactions flow in as they happen.

Hit "Create Sync" and you're done.

What happens after

Once you create the sync, Redbark runs an initial import that pulls your historical transactions and pushes them to YNAB. Each transaction arrives in the right YNAB account based on your mapping, with the amount, payee name, date, and optionally the category you mapped.

After the initial sync, it's all event-driven. When your bank has new transactions, Fiskil notifies Redbark, and Redbark pushes them to YNAB. This usually happens within minutes of a transaction posting at your bank. You can also hit "Sync Now" from the dashboard if you don't want to wait.

Redbark generates a unique import ID for each transaction so YNAB can deduplicate. If the same transaction comes through twice, YNAB ignores the duplicate. If a pending transaction clears and the amount or description changes, Redbark updates it in YNAB.

Each sync run shows up in your activity feed with its status, how many transactions were synced per account, and how long it took.

If a sync fails (your YNAB token expired, your bank is temporarily down) Redbark retries automatically and emails you if it can't sort it out.

A note on amounts

YNAB uses a concept called milliunits. 1000 milliunits equals one dollar. Redbark handles this conversion for you. A $42.50 debit at the supermarket shows up as -42500 milliunits in YNAB's internals, but you'll just see -$42.50 in the app. Debits are negative, credits are positive, same as YNAB expects.

What we don't store

Your transaction data passes through our system in memory and goes straight to YNAB. Nothing is written to our database, our logs, or anywhere else. The database has sync configuration and execution stats (how many rows were added, when the sync ran), but never the transactions themselves. We wrote a full technical breakdown of how we handle data if you want the details.

Getting started

Sign up at redbark.app, connect a bank, connect YNAB, and create a sync. The 7-day trial doesn't require a credit card. After that, Pro is A$7.50/mo billed annually or A$9/mo billed monthly.

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