Docs: Manage Duplicates workflow

About the Manage Duplicates workflow

Tiller’s bank data feed may occasionally insert duplicate transactions into your Transactions sheet. Often times these are addressable by user action or by having the support team contact Tiller’s data provider.

Review this help article on why you might be seeing duplicates to help prevent them.

In rare cases, duplication issues cannot be resolved and will persist.

If duplicate transactions happen occasionally or regularly without resolution, use the Manage Duplicates workflow to address the issue. You can also use this workflow if you’ve manually added transactions for an account that you’re now able to connect (or reconnect in the case of a long term outage).

Recommended Duplicate Cleaning Workflow

  1. Install or launch the Tiller Community Solutions add-on
  2. Navigate to Tools > Utilities > “Manage Duplicates”. The workflow will check for compatibility issues and make sure the Transactions sheet is your actively selected tab.
  3. Click the Flag Duplicates button (in Step 1). The workflow will analyze your transactions and highlight rows with suspected duplicate transactions in orange.
  4. Review the highlighted transactions.
  5. If you see a transaction that should have been flagged as a duplicate, select a cell in the row and then click the orange Flag Selected button. (Hold shift and click multiple rows to select multiple transactions before clicking the “Flag Selected” button.)
  6. If you see a transaction flagged as a duplicate that isn’t actually a duplicate (i.e. you do not want it deleted), select a cell in that transaction’s row and then click the Unflag Selected button. (Hold shift and click multiple rows to select multiple transactions before clicking the “Unflag Selected” button.)
  7. Once you’re satisfied with the flagged transactions, click the “Delete Flagged Transactions” to delete the duplicate transactions. You’ll get a confirmation modal, and then all rows that have been highlighted in orange will be deleted.

Be aware that deletions can only be undone using Google Sheet’s Version History tools.

How Manage Duplicates works

The workflow identifies transactions that have a date of within 3 days of each with the same amount and other data including description, institution, and account number. The Manage Duplicates workflow highlights a suspected duplicate row with an orange fill. You’ll have an opportunity to flag additional transactions that should have been highlighted and also to remove the flag for transactions that are not actually duplicates. Once you’re ready, the workflow can delete all flagged duplicate transactions.

  • The duplicate flagging analysis will usually preserve the oldest/original transaction from a set of duplicate transactions.
  • If only one transaction within a set of duplicates has been categorized, the duplicate flagging analysis will preserve the categorized transaction (even if it is the newest).
  • To identify a match, the duplicate flagging analysis requires an exact match for all of the following fields (if present) across the set of duplicates:
    • Amount
    • Description
    • Full Description
    • Account
    • Account #
    • Institution

Troubleshooting

If you have a question or need help first search the community to see if someone has already asked and if not click here to quickly post a question about this tool in the Google Sheets category.

Be sure to customize the title of your post with keywords about the issue or question so others can easily find the Q&A in search.

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