[zo1]

I think they went a little too-heavy into the "manual" part of YNAB at some point. Internally and from the UI (YNAB 4) it has everything to do the stuff automatically and that's what I do.

E.g. When I get paid, that gets loaded into YNAB using a bank-import. So even if the rules don't run, I just have to go through all my "transactions" that got loaded from the bank import and just assign to pre-defined "payees". Further, each payee has a linked category so I don't have to categorize what expense that transaction was for, because it's implied by who the payee is. E.g. A butchery store payee means the category is e.g. "Groceries - Food - Meat" or just "Monthly Groceries". YNAB also has a filter where it highlights all transactions that haven't been assigned.

With the above stuff, there is no need to do any manual or scheduled expenses. The only time that doesn't apply is when you withdraw cash and spend it that way. If you do a lot of cash transactions, you'd have to do that manually unfortunately. But for myself, what little I spend using cash I just zero-out my "cash" account every once in a while with a manual transaction that is an "unknown expenses" budget category.

Some of the stuff above is specific to the YNAB 4 desktop software - before they converted to a subscription web-based tool.