Duplicate transactions; Transaction sheet functionality broken

@heather
Since at least May 8th, I have been receiving duplicate transactions from 3 different institutions. I am currently running through the process of cleaning duplicates, but I am a bit concerned that there is something that broke on my transaction sheet.
Not only are the individual transactions being duplicated, but the category lookup (data verification) and an added description lookup stopped appearing on the new transactions.

Do you have any suggestions? Would it make sense to use the version history and roll back to before the 8th and re-import transactions? What is the best process at this point?

Thanks

Hi @jdackson, you can try out the Manage Duplicates workflow in the Tiller Labs add-on

If the Transaction IDs or other data points are missing it could have been due to an issue that was fixed on Monday with the Tiller Money Feeds add-on.

As far as the data validation missing on some columns you may need to just add that back.

Heather

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Hi, the exact same things are happening to me since the Refresh All button was removed - duplicates and no data validation.

I’ve never had any issues like this before recent updates. Will this just be something that returns to normal after the next update?

Thanks so much.

@heather
Duplicate transactions are still happening - on all accounts/institutions/transactions.
It appears to me that the full transaction is downloading including the transaction IDs and other data points.
(note: my daily email of transactions are not showing a duplicate transactions - only my Google Sheet.)

Hi @wkiri, these issues are likely to be unrelated to the refresh all button being removed. That didn’t affect how data gets fed to the sheet, just how the data is downloaded into our system before it makes it into the sheet. Two separate processes.

@jdackson and @wkiri I’d recommend reviewing our guide on duplicates here:

If that doesn’t help please reach out to our support team using the chat tool in the lower right corner of the Console at https://sheets.tillerhq.com/auth/google we can get things working for you.

Same thing is happening to me on my accounts. Particularly Chase.

The same thing is happening to me! This is extremely frustrating and all started changing once those updates occurred. This may have me switch away from Tiller if they don’t fix it. I don’t have time to keep fixing my spreadsheet each time updates occur and break something @heather

FYI I’ve used all your help links but the issues still occur, so no need to suggest that.

I’ve reached out to support and all that seems you do is send us more of the same articles. We have already used those and need a better solution. This transactions sheet is the heart of the spreadsheet and needs to work properly.

@alkrongold, I just reached out to you via the support thread you have open to see if we can get to the bottom of this. The day we pushed the changes to the Account Summary on the Console we also pushed an update to the Tiller Money Feeds add-on, which is more likely the culprit for this type of issue.

@heather, I sent you the transactions that came in this morning through the chat feature in hopes that will help get to get this resolved. Did you receive that?

@jdackson or @alkrongold are either of you also using the Statements sheet from Tiller Labs add-on?

The column is there, but I have never used the function.

No, I am not using statements. I may have the sheet but I don’t use it.

I saw this behavior (duplicate transactions with missing data validation) one day when all these changes were being made. The Update Sheets function took 30 minutes to run that morning - the only time I have seen that take more than a minute or two. I logged OUT of Tiller Money Feeds Setting page, logged out of Tiller Console and closed my Tiller spreadsheet. I then reopened and logged back into everything. It has not duplicated any transactions for me since then.

Thanks for the feedback @jdackson, @alkrongold and @martha.rudkin. We’ve reproduced the issue with the following scenario:

  1. You installed the Statements sheet
  2. You removed the Statements sheet, but left the Statement column intact in the Transactions sheet.

Our team is working on a fix and we’ll post recommendations here when we have an update.

Is this true of your affected sheets, @kirbyjayclay @wkiri?

Hi!

Yes, that’s correct for me, deleted Statements sheet but not Statements column within Transactions sheet.

Thanks for looking into this. I’ll try to delete Statements column and see if this helps at all, while I wait to hear back.

Best,
Kiri.

The reason you’re getting duplicates in this scenario is that the Tiller Money Feeds add-on writes the data validation rule back into those columns after it feeds new data in, but since it can’t find the Statements sheet it crashes on the re-writing the rule and then it doesn’t know where it left off adding transactions (in come the duplicates).

The fix for now is to remove the Statements column from your Transactions sheet (right click the column header to delete it) and then the updates will stop crashing and causing duplicates.

You can try using the Duplicates Manager from Tiller Labs to correct the existing duplicates.

Thanks Heather. Along with the duplicates, for me, the category column stopped including the data validation.

We have reproduced a scenario where a data validation conflict interrupts the Update Feeds script and produces wonky results— notably possible loss of data validation in the Transaction sheet and also possible duplicates.

The problem is caused by data validation conflicts in the Transactions sheet (i.e. the scripts are trying to write in new records that do not comply with the data validation rules in the sheet). I believe our code properly handles the situation where a category is written via AutoCat that is not/no-longer in the Categories sheet and conflicts with the Category column data validation… but the missing-Statements sheet (i.e. data validation to a sheet that is not present) seems to be an exceptional case of this bug and apparently exacerbates the problem. I believe this is a Google API bug as this handling this situation shouldn’t be any different from coding robustly for other data validation conflicts. Nevertheless, we are working on the issue.

In the short term, the easiest fix is:

  • Remove the Statement column from Transactions if you are not using it (or at least remove the data validation on the entire column if there are values you wish to preserve), and
  • Do your best to ensure your AutoCat rules do not conflict with Transactions sheet data validation

Randy

P.S. Regarding the loss of data validation, @fullyspooled, I recommend re-adding the Category column data validation linking back to the Categories sheet using the menu bar.

Just wanted to follow up that we pushed the fix for this yesterday. The sheet won’t update with this data validation issue, but it will present an error instead of crashing in the middle of an update and then introducing duplicates on the next update.

Just wanted to note that the duplicates would be for ALL accounts linked to the sheet, not just a specific institution. If you’re experiencing duplicates for a specific institution, you should review our duplicates guide and then reach out to support if needed.

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