YNAB API: Get total amount paid to each payee

I created this little shell pipeline to help me see the total amount given to or received from people and companies using my data in YNAB.

I used the new YNAB API, jq and q to get a CSV out. It’s not perfect as it includes the “Transfer: Bank Account” payees, but it’s good enough for my purposes.

First set an access token in the environment. You can get an access token from https://app.youneedabudget.com/settings/developer.

export YNAB_ACCESS_TOKEN='...'

Then you can run the pipeline, which should default to your last-used budget. This outputs a CSV where the first column is the payee name and the second column is the total amount paid to that payee (if negative) or received from that payee (if positive).

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $YNAB_ACCESS_TOKEN" https://api.youneedabudget.com/v1/budgets/last-used/transactions \
  | jq -r '.data.transactions | .[] | [.payee_name,.amount] | @csv' \
  | q -d, 'select c1, sum(c2)/1000.0 as total from - group by c1 order by total'