Find Recurring Payees in Last 2 Months (YNAB) HTML Report

Spot recurring payees from the last two full months in YNAB—instantly

This manual n8n workflow pulls your most recent two full months of YNAB transactions, finds payees that appear in both months, and generates an easy-to-review HTML report inside n8n. If you want to quickly identify potential recurring charges, this workflow gives you a clear, month-by-month view of each repeating payee.

What this workflow does

When you manually run it in n8n, the workflow:

• Calculates the two most recent full calendar months to use as the analysis window.
• Reads your target YNAB budget ID (you can set it directly or use YNAB’s last-used shortcut).
• Requests YNAB transactions starting from the beginning of the older month via the YNAB API.
• Groups transactions by payee and filters to keep only payees that have at least one transaction in both months.
• Generates an HTML table listing each repeating payee with one transaction date and amount from each month.
• Displays the HTML report directly in n8n so you can review the results immediately.

Use cases

• Budget hygiene: Identify subscription-like or recurring expenses by payee before they surprise you.
• Fast reconciliation: Compare month-over-month transactions to spot consistent merchants or payees.
• SaaS operator review: Quickly surface recurring vendor/payee spend for better forecasting.

Technical details

• Trigger: Manual Trigger
• Yarn/logic: Set, Code, HTML
• Reporting: Generates an HTML table for in-n8n review
• API call: HTTP Request using YNAB Personal API Token with HTTP Bearer Auth
• Documentation node: Sticky Note (for guidance)

Setup requirements

• Provide a YNAB Personal Access Token as an HTTP Bearer Auth credential for the YNAB API request.
• Set your YNAB budget ID (or use last-used).