Bank feed transaction amount changes, mobile application progress updates
Blog post · 8 Apr, 2012
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Updates have been deployed to both the Bank Feed service and PocketSmith, improving the way transaction signs are dealt with (i.e. positive and negative values). In addition, a problem with returning all transaction set when selecting “Clear account from first transaction?” option in the Feeds overlay has also been resolved.
We’re also making significant advances towards the alpha release of the new PocketSmith Mobile application. For more details on all of these updates, please read on.
The way that the Bank Feed service and data provider deals with positive and negative transactions has found to not been consistent. While we’ve been advising people in the past to use the “Reverse amounts” option in the edit Transaction Account form (My Accounts widget > Manage > Edit) it has been found that this does not cover all possibilities that arise.
Previously, “reverse amounts” is used when uploaded Credit Card statements have the incorrect sign used in the uploaded file (i.e. downloaded OFX or CSV bank statements). When importing, this option reverses all amounts for transactions being imported - making positive values negative and vice-versa. It was found that while this approach works well with uploaded bank statements, it doesn’t work as well with the Bank Feed service due to differences in the source data.
The problem has now been resolved, through extracting more information about the transaction from the data provider, and using it to correctly set the transaction sign within the Bank Feed service. We now determine whether or not the transaction is marked as a debit or credit, and always return the correct transaction sign based on this - regardless of the positive or negative sign that the data provider has given the amount.
The “reverse amounts” option for bank-feed-connected transaction accounts is now not required - whether a transaction is positive or negative comes directly from whether it is flagged as a “debit” or “credit”. This means that all bank-feed-connected accounts have had the “reverse amounts” option turned off, as amounts are correct when received from the source. This option is still valid and recognised, so it can be re-activated for accounts, however there should no longer be any cases where this is required for bank feed connected accounts.
In addition, we’ve run a script to correct the signs on existing transactions from the Bank Feed service, so that all transactions are now correct positive or negative amounts, based on being flagged as “debit” or “credit”. Account balances were also recalculated from the original starting balance set from the Bank Feed service in these cases.
If you have any questions at all about these changes, please get in touch with us.
It was discovered that when assigning a Bank Feed service account to a PocketSmith transaction account in the feeds overlay, the “Clear account from first transaction?” option was not forcing the Bank Feed service to return all transactions that had been found - it was still returning only the most recent dates instead of absolutely all transactions available.
This error has now been fixed, and if you assign or re-assign a Bank Feed account to a Transaction Account, all transactions found in the bank feed service will be requested and received.
Development of the new HTML5 PocketSmith Mobile is going well, and we’re gearing up to pre-release an early version of the application in the next week.
We’ll be getting in touch with a few select users to try out the mobile application in the first instance - if you are interested in being one of the very first to have a look at the first cut, please get in touch and let us know!
