Investment account feeds available, more flexible Personal Summary and more
Blog post · 20 Dec, 2012
READ ON
The year is quickly coming to a close, and we’re happy to make some announcements as we head towards the holiday and Christmas period. Some important changes have been made to the Bank Feed service which we’ll discuss below, as well as some enhancements to the Personal Summary. We’ll also discuss one of our priorities for immediate development in the coming month as well.
Up until now, a very limited range of invesment and stock account types have been able to be added to the Bank Feed service - only those which are provided by institutions which also provide other account types.
Now however we’ve opened things up significantly, and all of the stock and investment institutions that the data provider has available are now able to be linked up to your PocketSmith account.
Support for these account types is still in its early days, so we welcome your feedback on how your accounts are presented in PocketSmith. If there are any specific requirements you find lacking in the display of your investment based accounts, please let us know and we’ll adjust things to suit.
Previously the Personal Summary only showed comparison information for a forecast event / category in the calendar if an occurrence exists as at the date of the transaction. For example - if you had transactions starting in June 2012, but the forecast event for the category started in September 2012, then the Personal Summary would show nothing for the June through to September period.
We’ve now changed this so that if there is no occurrence in the calendar, PocketSmith considers it to have a 0 budget amount for the monthly period, and the sum of transactions for that month are summed - as shown below.
This categories forecast event starts in September, so all months prior to this are considered to have a 0 budget. Previously, these bars wouldn’t have been present.
This means that there is less data “hidden”, with fewer rigid requirements for when a bar is created for a time period - if a category has transactions, then it will always show in the Personal Summary.
This is an important change to enhance the reliability of the Bank Feed service, particularly when credentials are initially added for an institution. Up until now, we’ve added all available account types (e.g. bank accounts, credit cards, loans etc) available at an institution at once. This practice sometimes placed unnecessary strain on the data provider and online banking systems, causing some account types to return incorrect error messages.
To reduce the effect of this, you’re now able to select what account types at your bank you’d like to add when you’re entering your credentials - so you can skip those you don’t need.
When more than one account type is available at your bank, you’ll now be able to select which types you’d like to add.
This change means that only account types which are likely to be successful succeed will be checked, as they’ve been selected by yourself. This will will greatly enhance the reliability of the intitial credential addition procedure.
The Roadmap has sub-categorization as a short-term priority - in the coming month, the major precursor to allowing sub-categorization will be developed.
As many of our long-term users will know, categories in PocketSmith grew out of forecast events - add a repeating event to the calendar, and you had a category. This changed for the better with v2, however we’re now hitting up against the limitations of some design decisions we took back then.
In order for sub-categorization to work correctly, we need to go back and change some core parts of how a category works, and how it stands separate from an event. Though the result will not be ground-breaking, it is an important step in paving the way for some important features (such as sub-categorization) and overall performance improvements (particularly the Cashflows page with many categories).
We’ll continue to be working on other areas in the Roadmap as well, and will post progress here as it happens.
