The big one this month is net worth: NBU now tracks what you own and what you owe alongside your spending.
In this post
- 29 August · what a card is worth on your spending, cancel-by reminders, your card figures
- 25 August · the Reddit community, grey text you can read, the dashboard card, Valerie's errors
- 23 August · review reminders, the Notifications page
- 19 August · search past your date range, the statements you've imported, signing out
- 18 August · what a delete costs, steadier page loads, French amounts
- 15 August · pasted screenshots, the accounts your review was missing, the account picker
- 13 August · Valerie tells look-alike accounts apart, free setup
- 6 August · net worth, faster Valerie
29 August
New
See what a credit card is worth on your own spending. Type a card's terms into NBU: the welcome bonus, the rewards rates, the annual fee. It prices the card against what you actually spend, instead of handing you a number from a review site written for someone else's life. If the bonus is out of reach it tells you how much more you would have to spend every month to reach it, and says plainly that spending more to chase it loses you money. Pricing a card is free. Plus ranks your whole shortlist and lets you pick which card each kind of spending goes on. On the free plan you still see the routing page with your own spending and your own cards on it; only committing a choice is Plus.
On Plus, NBU emails you before a card's decision date comes up. Thirty days out, seven days out, and the day before, with the fee the card is about to charge you. One email a day however many cards are due, nearest deadline first. The button in it opens a page listing every card still waiting on an answer, with one press per card to record what you decided and five seconds to undo before anything is written. There is a switch in Settings to turn the whole thing off.
Fixed
Your card figures may go up. The monthly spending average behind every card number used to be divided by every month that held any transaction, including months that held nothing but a paycheque. If your chequing history ran longer than your credit-card history, your card spending was divided by too many months and every card looked worth about half what it is. It now divides by the months you have actually closed, or by the months that hold real card spending. If you have never closed a month, nothing here changes for you.
"Close a month to find out" stops being a dead end. The foundation check on the Churning page said that to anyone who had imported but never closed a month, permanently, with no way forward. It answers now.
Amounts are right when you have more than 1,000 transactions in the period. The database was handing back the first thousand rows and reporting success, so several figures were quietly short.
A card whose fee renews tomorrow is not charged a day early. Looking at it after 8pm Toronto time used to move the annual fee forward by a day.
Upgrading to keep a card estimate no longer throws the card away. You subscribed to keep the estimate and landed on your Sparks balance with the card you typed gone. You now come back to the Churning page with the estimate open, and closing it puts the card on your shortlist.
If you get around NBU with the keyboard, the focus outline is no longer cut off, and it no longer draws a square box around round buttons. The suggestion chips under Valerie were the worst of it, and that row sits on every screen. The same was happening to the tab strip on the Features page, the date buttons on the Net Worth chart, and any list that scrolls inside a panel.
25 August
New
NBU has a Reddit community. There is a link in the footer, under Company, in both languages. Release notes get mirrored to r/NextBestUse, and bug reports are welcome there.
Fixed
Grey text that was too faint to read is darker everywhere. 82 places, all of them now passing the accessibility contrast standard.
The dashboard card is named for what it tracks. It reads Active Pursuits instead of Active Bonuses, matching the word the Churning page already used, so the two pages stop calling one thing by two names. In French it reads Primes visées. The budget list beside it now finishes level with it instead of stopping short.
Valerie says what went wrong instead of leaving you stuck. A failure during your monthly close now gives you a real explanation and two ways forward: ask her again, or sort the month yourself. In chat, running out of Sparks says so and offers a top-up, instead of a generic error.
23 August
New
NBU can remind you to sit down with last month. Pick the day that suits how your statements arrive: the 4th, or the first Saturday on or after the 4th. You set it on the new Notifications page in Settings, and you can stop the emails from the email itself, in one tap, without signing in.
There is a Notifications page in Settings. It holds your review reminder and, for the first time, the product-news email.
Fixed
Two accounts with the same name stop being treated as one. Two chequing accounts both called "Chequing", at two different banks, used to end up as a single account when you imported a statement. NBU now asks you to point at the right account when there is any doubt, instead of assuming.
Net worth and your monthly review agree about your credit-card debt. Some past months counted the same card dollars twice, so the figure they showed was wrong. NBU recalculated those months.
A month you loaded as historical data can be closed. If you imported a month through "Load historical data" and then tried to close it, the review flow left you stuck: nothing to import, and no way forward. There's now a link straight to balances.
The close celebration sits in the middle of the screen on a tablet. It used to open hugging the left edge. Same for the badge award and the card-bonus panel.
Valerie cleans up a whole month of duplicates in one go. No more "that list got too long for me, ask me for the first half". If some of the rows were already gone she says so instead of claiming a clean sweep, and when a reply fails outright, the Spark it cost comes back.
Switching language keeps your place on the page, and doing it on an article that only exists in one language no longer dead-ends.
Deleting a category tells you how many transactions you'll actually affect, and asks again if that number changed while you were deciding.
If you navigate by keyboard, jumping past the navigation works on the settings pages. It used to land nowhere.
19 August
New
Search finds your transaction wherever it is. Type a merchant and you get the matches from the period you're looking at, plus a separate list of the ones outside it, so nothing looks like it disappeared. Your date range only moves if you tap "Show all time" yourself, and "All time" is now a row in the date filter instead of a button buried under the list.
You can see every statement you've imported, under Settings → Data management: the file name, which account it went into, and the month it covers. You don't have to wonder whether you already did August, or import the same statement twice because you couldn't remember. NBU doesn't store the statement itself. It keeps the file name, which is enough to tell one import from another.
Fixed
Signing out works again, and signing back in shows your account straight away. The error on the way out is gone, and you don't have to force-reload the page before NBU recognises you.
Statements from Desjardins import with the right year. The same went for any bank that prints the year only in the statement header. If you imported one recently and your spending showed up a year in the past, that was this.
18 August
New
Valerie informs you of the blast radius of a deletion before you answer. When you ask her to delete a category, she now says exactly how many of your transactions will be left without one. You see that number before you say yes, not after. And once the category is gone, she offers to move those transactions somewhere else instead of leaving you to go find them. In French too, in her own voice.
Pages stop jumping around while they load. Where you'd see a grey block in roughly the wrong place and then everything shuffle when the numbers arrived, the placeholder now sits exactly where the real content will be. Quick loads no longer flash a grey box at you at all, and changing the net-worth date range dims the card instead of blanking your numbers to grey.
Fixed
Amounts you type in French save exactly as you typed them. Entering a balance as 1234,56 used to quietly save 1234, cents gone, no warning. Typing 12.50 with the dot on your keypad saved 1250. The same went for the annual fee, spend targets and reward rates on a credit card. Nothing you already saved changed; this only affects what happens when you type.
If you entered an amount in French before this and the number looks wrong, retyping it now will stick.
15 August
Fixed
Pasting a screenshot of a couple of transactions works. Two things were wrong. The drop zone had no paste handler, and the feedback panel, closed and invisible, was swallowing every image paste in the app. A cropped screenshot also has no year printed on it, and every row was being thrown out over that.
When a screenshot still can't be used, it tells you why. "We read the transactions, but no year is showing. Crop so the statement header is visible, or import the statement file instead." The old message guessed at a password-protected PDF instead.
The monthly review asks about the accounts you just created. If you set your accounts up this month and then ran last month's review, none of them were listed and you were never asked what they were worth.
Transactions dated outside the month you're closing get flagged before you import them, so a misread year can't slip in quietly.
The account dropdown scrolls and has a search box, and it's as wide as the field it drops out of. With enough accounts you couldn't reach the one you wanted, which meant you couldn't link a statement at all.
Budget Tracking scrolls past the tenth category.
The "skip to content" link works. If you navigate with a keyboard or a screen reader, the link on your first Tab did nothing on most pages and focus stayed where it was.
13 August
Valerie keeps two accounts of the same kind straight. Two chequing accounts at different banks, or three savings accounts, used to blur together and some of them never got created. She now asks what she needs to tell them apart, gives them names you can distinguish, and shows you which bank each one belongs to before you confirm. She can also rename and restyle your categories, and new ones come in properly capitalized instead of all lowercase.
Getting set up is free for your first 20 messages. You were paying Sparks to onboard.
6 August
New
Net worth. Add the accounts you actually hold, from chequing and savings to a TFSA, an RRSP, a house, a car, credit cards and loans. NBU keeps a running picture of what you own, what you owe, and which way it's moving. There's a trend line and a breakdown by group, and you can hide the headline number when you don't feel like seeing it. When you import a statement, NBU reads the closing balance off it and offers to fill the value in for you, so the monthly update is a tap rather than typing. Sold something, or closed an account? Archiving it stops the account going forward without erasing the history it already has, so your past months keep telling the truth. This replaces the old Investing page, which is gone.
Valerie is running on a newer generation of Google's models. Replies come back quicker and hold up better on the harder questions.
Fixed
Your monthly community contribution isn't charged before you've started using NBU. If you signed up but hadn't imported anything yet, the first monthly tick took 100 Sparks you'd never used the app to earn, and the second locked you behind a blocking overlay. That was about a month from signup to being shut out of a product you'd never used. Refunds that claw Sparks back follow the same rule now.
The free-import offer on the review screen scrolls into view on a small phone. It was cut off at the bottom with no way to reach it. And once you've used up your free import window, that card stops appearing at all instead of sticking around to tell you it's finished.