Her finances are relatively simple with a few banking accounts but she leans heavily on Venmo for transfers with her friends. We have connected her Venmo account through the Tiller-Yodlee integration.
The challenge is that she is seeing the Venmo transactions doubled-up in her Transactions sheet both in her bank accounts— as payments and aggregated cashouts— and also in her Venmo feed.
I think our options are:
Delete one side of the transactions (e.g. the banking side which have less payee detail)… but this approach seems lossy.
Apply a transfer-type category (marked hidden) to one side of the transactions (e.g. the banking side)… but I have historically balanced my transfers (and the doubles of these transactions are always going the same way).
Create a category type that is hidden like Transfers but don’t call it Transfers and don’t bother to balance it. (This is the same as the approach above functionally but different semantically.)
We are only getting Venmo transactions when they hit our bank account. By design, no money is stored in venmo, and we just don’t connect that to the feed. So every transaction is only shown once, and it is on the bank feed.
I didn’t even know you could get venmo connected with more details…now maybe I will go down the same rabbit hole as you.
I didn’t realize you could get a feed from Venmo. I think a transfer on one side and an categorized expense on the other would work. I’ll let you know where I end up.
I think you may want to just link one of the Venmo accounts - doesn’t a single connection pull in both a Venmo Balance account and a Venmo account? I could be wrong…
This is similar to my wife’s PayPal account. I see the PayPal transaction that money was spent, and then I see the transfer out of the bank account to PayPal, but PayPal doesn’t show the transfer in from the bank. I’ve been manually creating the PayPal ‘Transfer in’ so I can sleep at night knowing my Linked Transfers sheet is balanced…
This is exactly what I do as well. I actually avoid paying with Venmo or PayPal when I can for this very reason. I hate having to add extra transactions.
After observing how convoluted my AutoCat rules are for Venmo and PayPal, and thinking about the required manual transaction workflow, I’m reconsidering having my Venmo/PayPal/etc accounts linked to Tiller. Since I don’t carry a balance on these accounts and I’m going to be performing manual steps anyway, I think it might be more efficient to simply update/split the transactions when they hit my bank accounts. I might be obfuscating some of the money trail, but will I actually lose anything of value by changing my workflow? Does anyone have any new thoughts?
