Just to add on to the pile here, this has also affected my workflow. I appreciate the complexities that Tiller is trying to deal with, but my use case is my use case. I like to check my finances regularly - sometimes that is daily, sometimes it’s a couple of times a week. But any time I check my finances, I want to have the latest information available to me. In the past this means that my first step was to go to Tiller and refresh everything before going to my various Sheets. I will continue to do this even though it’s gotten more cumbersome.
To be clear, I would really prefer NOT to have to go to Tiller every time, but the variability with which accounts are refreshed gives me very LOW confidence that Sheets are up to date with the latest data. So I always have to refresh first. In an ideal world, Tiller would always have the “latest” information available so I could just go to my Sheets.
I hope that Tiller continues to pursue excellence in this regard and pushes on Yodlee as well to improve the situation.
I’m also frustrated that it is now harder for me to have most current data to work with when I am using Tiller. My workflow has changed to selectively use the Refresh button on my most active accounts and let the automatic updates be “good enough” on the less frequently used accounts.
My suggestion for the console would be to divide the accounts into 2 groups - those needing MFA and those not needing MFA. Use check boxes in the non-MFA section that would allow a one step Refresh for selected accounts. The MFA section would not allow multiple selections and would need individual Refresh one by one. There could be more direct, brief instructions to users in each section about Best Practices.
I know that my accounts have been some of the weird behavior accounts and the Tiller Team has been very responsive in collecting information and trying to resolve issues for me when I contact them. The most recent console update has had a positive change with the way my Bank of America accounts refresh and that’s a good step in the right direction.
I definitely agree with this. I want my accounts updated at a certain time of day that is convenient for me. Refresh all works best but if that is not is not an option at least make the manually refresh of each individual account faster/easier. This is pretty frustrating process right now.
Or even more ideal would be let us schedule the one time per day we want our accounts to refresh.
Thanks
Thank you for sharing this update @martha.rudkin - your experience with BoA is exactly the type of issue we were hoping to address with the most recent update. We’ve also had some other customers report that they’re no longer receiving max threshold errors (@arjones40). With these new changes we’re also hearing that more customers are finding that accounts they previously had to refresh with a 2FA code are now automatic. That proves to us the hybrid (and unsupported) implementation we were using was causing many issues with customers ability to reliably refresh accounts.
We’re also hoping these changes will reduce the requirement to contact our data provider for refresh/connection issues and when we do, we’ll know with confidence it’s their issue and not ours.
We do hope to offer a more convenient and timely interactive refresh experience in the future, and appreciate the feedback on being willing to pay more for that.
We also want to share that this experience with refreshing interactively (where you initiate a refresh vs the system doing it automatically in the background) that launches a data provider’s connection “widget” is actually common for many personal finance apps and is the only workflow supported by Plaid, another data aggregator.
In the future we also hope to offer multiple aggregators as fallbacks for institutions that aren’t supported by Yodlee or that are in an outage state. NOT building our own custom UI for “Fastlink” (the Yodlee refresh/connection widget) has advantages in that we wouldn’t be able to reuse it for other aggregators, but it’s not necessarily off the table.
Our current data feeds priority is the transition of customers on the legacy API for Yodlee (those who started prior to Jan 2019) to our implementation of their latest API, which has more timely refreshes (sometimes less than 24 hours) for accounts that can refresh automatically.
Finally, the banking and financial data aggregation industry is moving toward a more open banking infrastructure, which will make all of this irrelevant anyway. You can read more about how all this has evolved over on our blog here.
With all that being said, I will inquire with Yodlee on whether there is an option we can turn on that will let you schedule when you’d like to have accounts automatically refresh. It’s not something are currently aware exists, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.
Boy, it stinks that others are having big problems. I miss the refresh all button, too, but I found it didn’t really work for my MFA accounts and I had to click each of their refresh buttons manually anyway.
I’m a big fan of the blue vs white button. Makes it easy for me to scan.
I am lucky that only 2 of my accounts need manual refresh. I don’t mind the extra step. I find the console to be a big improvement over what we had last year.
It’s odd for me. I have one account that refreshes regularly every day at about 3 am PT. I have two other accounts that have not refreshed since I last did it manually 50 hours ago.
EDIT:
I’m getting ready to refresh each of my accounts manually but before I do I thought I’d just document the “daily” auto refresh experience. As of 7 am on May 18:
Ameriprise last refreshed 48 hours ago (manual)
BECU last refreshed 72 hours ago (manual)
Discover card refreshed 12 hours ago (auto)
Capital One last refreshed 72 hours ago (manual)*
Citi Bank 8 hours ago (auto)
Simple Bank 15 hours ago (auto)
Chase 48 hours ago (manual)
Discover Bank 48 Hours ago (manual)
I’d recommend adjusting your workflow to check in every other day vs every morning or shift to checking in during the evening if this seems to be a better time. It’s not that the accounts don’t refresh automatically, but it might be a longer window for some than others.
I mean, it says right in Tiller’s H1 what to expect: “Your financial life in Google Sheets, automatically updated each day”. To suggest changing the workflow is to misunderstand the value your customers want and expect.
We are downright flattered that Tiller Money is a part of your morning routine, but if you don’t want the hassle of 20+ minutes to refresh all your accounts an every other day cadence may be more tenable or transitioning to institutions that have faster automated refreshes - generally smaller credit unions it seems - but we don’t have an official list.
The second approach (change your financial institutions) isn’t a great solution either. I think folks are (sadly) much more likely to change from Tiller to another tool that updates more regularly. I love Tiller and would love to stay on but even 10 minutes every other day = 35 minutes a week = 30 hours a year wasting my life working around these issues. When the whole reason I signed up was because of automated (or very quick w/ Refresh all) data updates.
Do you have a better solution on the horizon, and a rough timeline (weeks/months/years) you can share?
(e.g. build our own account connection/MFA form into the Console - like the UX Personal Capital has - they also use Yodlee, but they have 850 employees, we have 11, and we’re not selling your data to pay the bills like they are).
Quick note, Yodlee does sell our data (Discourse prevents including URLs as a reference but a quick Google will verify this).
So Tiller may not be selling it directly like Personal Capital, but presumably the rate it pays Yodlee is somewhat subsidized.
@rmr, thanks for the feedback. I don’t have a timeline right now on a better solution. I totally get your points here and will share them with the team.
I know this is disappointing to many, but it’s just a step we had to take right now. Trust me, I fought for alternatives because I knew there would be outcry like this, but I don’t make all the decisions here.
@wegs220! Thanks for checking in. This is not a change we’ll be reversing at this time. We’re required by our data provider to only allow individual account refreshes.
