During a YNAB import, any loan or mortgage that has payment activity is flagged with a warning, and you can't finish until you resolve it. This is expected, and it's worth understanding why.
The problem
YNAB tracks an interest-bearing loan's balance in its own loan engine. It does not export the accrued interest as register rows. So if you add up the loan's transactions in the exported CSV, you get a number that is less than the balance YNAB actually shows you.
Real figures from a customer export:
| Account | Register total | YNAB's balance | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Car loan | −$15,024.40 | −$21,563.11 | $6,538.71 |
| Personal loan | −$51,707.49 | −$52,171.16 | $463.67 |
| Mortgage | −$315,483.00 | −$315,483.00 | — |
The mortgage matches because its register is a single Starting Balance row — no payments, so no missing interest. The other two don't, and no amount of cleverness in the import can recover the difference. It simply isn't in the file.
Rather than silently import a wrong balance, Earmarkr asks you.
What you'll see
On the Review balances step, an affected account shows a warning block with three choices:
Enter the real balance (recommended)
Type the balance YNAB shows for that account today. Earmarkr posts a single dated transaction
called Balance Adjustment (imported) for the difference, so the account lands on the correct
figure and reconciles exactly.
Keep the register math Import the transaction total as-is. Choose this if the account genuinely has no missing interest and you'd rather not add an adjustment row.
Don't import Skip the account entirely. Useful for a loan you've since paid off or replaced.
Accounts netting to roughly $0.00 are pre-set to Don't import — those are usually paid-off or superseded. Untick any you want to keep.
Where to find the real balance
In YNAB, open Accounts and read the balance shown next to the loan. That's the number to enter. Use the balance as of today, not a statement date.
After the import
The adjustment is an ordinary transaction. You can see it in the account's activity, and it's category-less, so it doesn't affect your budget — only the account balance and your net worth.
If you re-run the import with a different figure, the adjustment updates rather than stacking. Clear the figure and it's removed.
Getting the payoff projection right
Once balances are correct, add the loan's terms to get a payoff projection — interest rate, term, scheduled payment, and origination date. Earmarkr replays your real payments against those terms and projects your payoff date and interest saved.
See loans and mortgages.
Why not just import the interest? The export doesn't contain it — not as rows, not as a summary field. Reconstructing it would mean guessing a rate and a schedule and back-computing, which would produce a confident-looking number that is quietly wrong. Asking you takes ten seconds and is exactly right.