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We'll post major updates and new feature information here. You can also see what we're working on right now.
SEE CHANGES
The next phase of the new transaction search in beta has arrived. Along with other small improvements, it introduces full management for saved searches and filters - so you’ll no longer need to turn off the new transaction search to manage these.
Along with this, the “Bulk actions” modal pop-up which appears when selecting transactions and clicking “More…” has received a redesign, when you’re using the new transaction search.
This completes the overall experience of this upgrade. We’ll be continuing to refine the user interface of the new search, after which we’ll release this as a public feature preview. In the meantime if you’d like access, please get in touch and let us know!
Not everyone wants or needs to have all available history imported for their feeds, especially when first getting started with PocketSmith. This has become particularly relevant as more data providers with access to larger transaction history - sorting through a full year of transactions can be laborious if you only want to start tracking your spending from today.
Now when you first set up a bank feed, or click “History settings” in the Manage Feeds page toolbar, you’re able to choose what date you want transactions from newly added feeds to import from. Note that this will not affect your existing feeds or transaction history - only newly linked feed accounts will take this setting into account.
Along with some other improvements for file imports which offer better progress monitoring for imported files, all imports are now able to be resumed, and will be remembered if you close the application.
For regular file imports for a bank, this means that you’ll be notified that the import has completed – or still in progress across – all pages of the application. This is displayed on the lower left, as shown in the screenshot. Clicking “Show” will show you more detailed progress.
This also means that for larger imports (such as when importing from other personal finance tools), you can close your browser window and come back at a later time to complete the final stages of the import, once the heavy lifting has been completed.
All widgets in the dashboard now take safe balance into account across the board, including the balance graph, total balance and account list widgets. These widgets will show the safe balance for activated accounts by default, and features a clickable balance information popup which shows related balance information.
There is still a bit of work to complete prior to safe balance being able to exit beta (not the least of which is full mobile support) - but this is a key component along the path to that.
A new option has been added to the merchant section of the transactions search, where you can specify “only” as a condition, alongside the existing “all” and “any” options.
This means that you can be super specific about what transactions you’re matching – for example, you can find transactions with only “Wool” as the merchant, without matching “Woolworths” transactions too.
Improvements have been made to ensure that a transaction doesn’t continue to be marked as a transfer, if that transaction is uncategorised or reassigned to a non-transfer category. This matches the existing behaviour where transactions are marked as a transfer, if assigned to a transfer category. This behaviour won’t occur if the transaction in question already has a matching transfer transaction (of the same date and amount in a different account).
This process will mean that less management of the transfer status of transactions is required, when recategorising transactions that automatic categorisation processes might have gotten wrong.
We’ve made changes to make the feed “synced” status easier to interpret, with a clearer display of how long ago the feed last synced. The colour of the “synced” status will also change from green to orange if the feed last synced more than 2 days ago.
These changes will make it easier to identify if something is going wrong, even if the official status of the feed is that it has synced.
We’ve been hard at work on a new transaction search interface, which we’re confident enough to release to limited preview. It’s still a work in progress, and features are still actively being added to it (such as being able to manage your Filters using this new interface).
Despite that, it’s certainly ready for everyone who would like to give it a spin at this early stage - just reach out to us and let us know. We’ll activate the ability to be able to toggle the search on and off from the User Preferences > Beta Settings area, so that you can control when you want to see the new search and not. Get in touch now to get access!
If you are using rollover on some of your budgets, you will now see an extra setting on both the Income & Expense and Budget pages.
The Budget page setting lets you choose if you want rollover amounts included in the budget bar totals at the top of the page. The Income & Expense report setting allows you to decide if you want the rollover amounts included within all totals in the report.
Previously, there was no option and the rollover amounts were always included. These settings provide you with more control over when rollover amounts are included, which is useful if you’re trying to compare what your income and expenses will be for a period.
Further improvements to how rollover amounts are shown on these pages are planned.
All new bank feed accounts created after today will default to using the transaction / card swipe date for transactions, instead of the posted date, when possible.
The transaction date is the date that you actually transacted, whereas the posted date is when the bank actually processes the transaction. Often these are the same date, but sometimes - for example on weekends - it can take a few days for the transaction to post / process.
In cases where this data is available to us (and it’s not in all cases, especially for open banking feeds), it’ll mean that your dates in PocketSmith are far more likely to match the dates seen in your banking apps, and also results in better alignment for spending inside budget periods too.
Older accounts can have this optioned turned on for them as well, just get in touch and we can activate this for you!
In order to ensure we’re delivering the most accurate and timely bank feed support possible, we’ve introduced a new system for getting support for any bank feed issues that you’re experiencing.
After clicking on “Feed help” from the main help menu, you’ll be guided through specifying the issue that you’re experiencing, what feed you’re having trouble with, and any additional information needed so we can help you as swiftly as possible.
You’ll spend less time requesting help now, along with fewer back-and-forward emails between yourself and the support team to provide all the information needed to get you the help needed.
You can access this new feature now by navigating to the help (?) menu and clicking “Feed help”.
The transactions page now lets you search for transactions which don’t have specific labels, by choosing “none” when choosing some labels in the search form. In this mode, only transactions that have none of the selected labels will be returned.
This comes along with a tweak in the way that the label search options are presented: there is now a dropdown with the three options within it: any, all, and none. The “all” option replaces the “Match all” checkbox that was previously used.
This new capability will be extremely helpful especially when combined with other search fields, and once stored as a saved search, will be great for use in various Dashboard widgets.
Now you’re able to click the roll-up icon on the right of each row in the Income & Expense report to roll-up the numbers of a child category into its parent.
The roll-up status is kept consistent between the Budget page and the Income and Expense report, to ensure simpler comparison between individual categories across these features.
This change also adds guidance alongside the sum totals that appear at the bottom of the table, in the cases that the numbers include hidden categories or exclude rolled-up categories.
It’s not always clear what category settings have been applied for a particular category. And as it’s a key part of how category-based budget reporting is performed, this setting is now front-and-center on the Categories page. It’ll show as either “Income”, “Expense” or “Expense and Income” depending on the category type settings which are applied.
In addition, the category type will now automatically change to the correct type, if you edit the only budget in the category to be a different type. So if you accidentally create your “Wages” budget to be an expense budget at first, editing that budget to be an income will have the category type change to income.
The first of a two-part upgrade has been released for the Income & Expense report - categories can now be nested underneath their parent categories. You’ll find a new “Nest categories” toggle in the left-hand sidebar to activate this new mode.
The change is for better visual organization of the report, for the moment. Further improvements to fully support budget rollup into parent categories (as we do in budget analysis) is coming soon. We understand how important rollup is in this report for many of you, but we didn’t want to delay getting basic nesting released while development continues.
Along with the future release of rollup, we’ll also be improving the exports to include more nesting information within them, as well as introducing more guidance around the amounts displayed - in particular when parent categories are collapsed.
Some dashboard widgets focus on transaction analysis, and allow for a range of filtering options to choose which transactions are included in analysis. These widgets are the earning and spending pie chart, the category sankey diagram, and the transactions column widget.
Our second upgrade for Christmas: you can now switch from regular filtering for these widgets, to instead use saved searches to select which transactions are included! This means all the power of the search on the transactions page is now available to the above widgets.
You can show an earning and spending widget for a particular transaction label, or have a sankey diagram of transactions larger than a given amount, or put together a transactions column showing only transfers within the last 3 months that are over $100 in AUD, that include the word “christmas” in their description.
We wish you a very happy festive period, and are looking forward to sharing all the product improvements we’ll release in 2023 with you!
When you click on a sum of transactions in PocketSmith, you’ll be displayed the contributing transactions within a popup. As our first upgrade for Christmas this year, the new version of the popup has just been released:
As such an important part of being able to quickly view individual transactions that sum to the clicked number, this change should make finding relevant transactions faster. It’s just the start too - a second stage of improvements to the popup is planned, enabling quick transaction changes within the popup.
Stay tuned for our second Christmas upgrade tomorrow!
We’ve released some changes which makes it easier to view web application dashboards tailored for your phone.
You can now create a mobile-specific dashboard with a single column of widgets, customized as needed. Once you’re done, navigate to the Dashboard on your phone (selecting “remember me” when you log in), choose the Dashboard and “Add to Home screen” for easy access to your mobile dashboard into the future. This will help see you through until we add full Dashboard support on the native mobile apps.
With this release, we’ve also pushed the new Dashboard into prime-time, with the older dashboard now called the legacy dashboard. More updates are coming soon!
We’re happy to announce that all Basiq open banking feeds in Australia have now been enabled. These are all available via the regular feed search in PocketSmith, and are denoted by the “Open Banking” tag that appears to the right of each search result.
While everything is working well for the majority of customers, CDR open banking data sharing is still a fairly new concept. As a result, some banks still struggle to supply data reliably and completely. Please send us an email if you experience any problems, and we’ll be happy to look into the issue.
We’ve launched an importer for data exported from MoneyBrilliant, who have recently announced that they’re closing down the service over the next 6 weeks.
The data exports from MoneyBrilliant are in Excel format, and contain a lot of information - accounts, transactions, budgets and categories. Our importer can slurp up all this information and get your PocketSmith account set up with the data in minutes.
Further information on this soon, but for the moment you can check it out over at https://my.pocketsmith.com/setup/money_brilliant.
We’re nearing the full release for open banking feeds in Australia, with our new data partner Basiq. You can already add open banking feeds for Macquarie, Up, Ubank (ex-86400) and HSBC yourself, via the add feed search form.
People who get in touch are also able to migrate to using open banking feeds as well - so please send us an email if you’d like to switch.
As we learn about the nature of Australian CDR open banking feeds, we’re updating our Learn Center article with details. If you’re interested in some background reading, you can find all the details on our blog.
When searching for transactions between date periods, the selectable date ranges are now always relative to today.
In the past, date periods were stored as at a fixed point in time - when the saved search was created. Now, the date periods change on an ongoing basis, as time moves forward. For example, this means a saved search for transactions from “last week” will always return transactions from the week before the current week, even if the search is saved.
All date pickers throughout PocketSmith have been updated to include new rolling date period options. You can now choose rolling week, rolling month, or rolling year options, which change with today’s date. So for example, if it’s September 22 today, “rolling month” would select dates between August 23 until September 22.
A new widget has been released for the Dashboard, a transactions column widget! This is an extremely flexible widget that can be used in many ways, to present the total sum of transactions across a date period as a column chart.
