I have to echo that, John; I love this tool, but it was not worth the money without a USAA connection. Glad this is moving toward resolution!
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Just wanted to add my voice to the chorus thanking you for working to fix the USAA connection. I deeply appreciate the transparency you all give us into the resolution process and I know it can’t be easy or quick to work these types of things (particularly when parts of the process are outside of your control altogether) so I am really grateful for your efforts it getting these account data streams up and flowing again. Looking forward to when I don’t have to manually (with varying degrees of automation) input my USAA transactions anymore!! : )
Thanks for concentrating on getting the connections to work better. Are you planning on adding additional integrators in 2023 and not just relying on Yodlee?
Heather,
Oh… I get it.
Hey… here’s a sneaky game…
Maybe TILLER could point to a YODLEE page that doesn’t exactly say it, but would do the trick if Tiller customers read between the lines. YODLEE could call it a “compliance matrix” or a “feature table” or a “status page”.
And… if anyone asks you…
Michael did NOT suggest that Tiller implement a policy where you could tell your customers:
And… if anyone asks you…
Tiller didn’t tell you XYZ Credit Union was on the B-list.
Thanks,
Michael
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I recently left USAA because of their constantly breaking feeds (and also their interest rates are well below market). Maybe we can have a dashboard of institutions rated based on the relative stability of their feeds?
When evaluating Tiller, I would very much have preferred to just not have been offered the option to connect to low volume institutions, period. Either that or have them display with a giant, flashing, red disclaimer warning “These are unsupported by our provider, should be considered unreliable, and may disappear on a moment’s notice, never to return.”
Between mid-October and today I’ve lost access to one provider per month, which despite the best (and much appreciated) efforts of the Tiller team, have not been restored (additionally my primary bank broke for about 2 weeks, but did get restored). So now I’m in the position of deciding whether to just give up and manage them manually, just stop tracking them entirely and simply monitor the statements, or wait a potentially indeterminate amount of time until they’re fixed. And then there’s the consideration of, if I keep managing them manually, then they start working again, what kind of data cleanup (e.g. duplicate transactions) am I going to have to do?
Personally, I would rather have just not set up any of those accounts in the first place, than go through my Quicken PTSD of watching my accounts start failing one after another. There’s still value (to me) in managing my high-volume accounts (my bank and my daily-expense credit cards), and then I can figure out some other solution for my lower volume accounts, like investments, FSA spending, store credit cards, retirement accounts, etc.
My expectation now is that I may very well lose any and all connectivity to any account on a moment’s notice and just have it be gone for good. Having the resolution be “we don’t know how long this will take to resolve, if it ever even gets resolved” might as well be “we don’t support this account” and would be clearer in managing expectations. To me, that would at least create a perception that the service, for those accounts that are supported, will be reliable. I don’t know the difference between high and low volume accounts, so from this user’s perspective, they’re all (potentially) brittle. Even the institution alerts spreadsheet doesn’t differentiate high vs. low volume. For accounts where I have a choice (unfortunately not the case for all my accounts), I would even consider changing banks just to use one that has a higher degree of support.
That said, I really like Tiller’s solution. I love the spreadsheet design. I love the community add-ins. The support team is incredibly responsive. I want this to be my long-term solution, because I’m not going back to Quicken, Mint, Personal Capital, GnuCash, Moneydance, YNAB, etc. (yes, I’ve tried them all). It’s either Tiller or I start with a blank spreadsheet and give up on bank feeds entirely. So I’m going to be cheering you on and offering to support troubleshooting the data feeds any way I can, because I dread doing everything by hand.
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@jemmoa7 it is something we’ll be considering, but no firm commitment on that for this year yet, though long term that is the goal.
@dave, definitely an interesting idea! Possibly something we can offer in the future, but currently we don’t have that information in a publicly consumable format.
@sfergus1 thanks for your feedback here. This new language is intended to correct this perception. This is not at all what we want to communicate and doesn’t reflect reality now that we’ve studied the resolution times/data for high/low volume sites. Additionally, we’ve worked closely with a new technical account manager at yodlee to understand the expectations around high volume/low volume site resolutions from their perspective. Generally high volume site issues are resolved faster, but only a little faster than those of low volume sites. It’s only in rare cases that they can’t solve a low volume site issue, and usually it’s a tiny or very obscure institution. All in all I’m glad to hear you’re loving Tiller though!
@michaelrwolfseattle, this information just isn’t available publicly anywhere…
I love my Tiller and appreciate all you do for us!
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thanks for your kind words 
glad you’re loving Tiller!Fearless honesty here. Thanks for having the conversation, and thanks even more for having it in public. This is the kind of product evolution I want from an “Open Banking” platform!
… says the guy who was in Open Source back when it was called Free Software – “Free as in Freedom. Free as in Beer.”
Many times, I’ve mentioned that “Check” is not a useful description field for an on line bill payment. Especially since I already pre-populated the payer informatioon (and memo) when I authorized that transaction. But… after many years, all I get from my credit union is “Check”. That makes it impossible to auto-categorize!
The “invisible hand” is at work.
Customers: If you ignore them, they WILL go away!
RE: Metrics
Metrics are very difficult to get in most industries. As a young industry, software development is behind most industries. Tiller sits in the middle of finances (lots of data) and software (not so much…). We are used to getting prime interest rates to 5 significant digits any time we want to get them, but trying to measure software quality or system resiliance is a very difficult.
That being said, some folks have moved the practice into the 21st century… specifically the “DevOps Research & Assesment” has been publishing scientific studies and have repeatedly found 4 numbers to be excellent predictors of “elite” teams
Through six years of research, the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team has identified four key metrics that indicate the performance of a software development team:
Deployment Frequency—How often an organization successfully releases to production
Lead Time for Changes—The amount of time it takes a commit to get into production
Change Failure Rate—The percentage of deployments causing a failure in production
Time to Restore Service—How long it takes an organization to recover from a failure in productionDina Graves Portman. (2020, September 22). Use Four Keys metrics like change failure rate to measure your DevOps performance. Retrieved January 25, 2023, from Google Cloud Blog website: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/using-the-four-keys-to-measure-your-devops-performance
Gone are the days of annual or quarterly software releases, or hours (days? weeks?) of down time. I’ll bet that Open Banking will start to create “information radiators” of these 4 metrics.
If you can’t measure something, you can’t improve it.
BTW… DORA, in keeping with their own continual improvement ethic, noticed a new trend and added a 5th metric in this year’s report – Reliability.
Times, they are a changin’.
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Gone are the days of annual or quarterly software releases, or hours (days? weeks?) of down time.
lol Someone forgot to tell that to Quicken.
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Not really. I was implying that market forces make corrections in a free market. Quicken has somehow transcended the tipping point where they are in a monopoly position.
Free markets tend to converge via negative feedback loops (i.e. More encourages less. Less encourages more).
Monopolies tend to diverge via positive feedback loops (i.e. More encourages more. Less encourages less).
About 10 years ago, I had an accountant tell me that Quicken was fatally flawed regarding professional practices within the financial world. The problem was that they had such a huge embedded base, they could not fix those flaws. She suggested Xero, saying that since they were from Australia (New Zealand?), they did not have an embedded base and were free to learn from Intuit’s mistakes, but not bound to repeat them. I like the thinking at the time. I also liked that Xero was currency independent… it was a product of the whole world. Unfortunately, being free from US customers, it was also free from many of the US customs. It had too many foreign assumptions hard wired in, and not enough US assumptions available.
Joke I learned in the 80’s when Microsoft was eating IBM’s lunch…
Q: How come God created the world in 7 (or 6) days, but IBM can’t do
A: God didn’t have an embedded base
Now it’s Microsoft that has the embedded base. They’re getting done to them what they did to IBM (in some markets, not all).
Caveat: It’s been over a decade since I formed these opinions of Xero product. They well may have flipped it around a few times since then. My inisghts into competition, monopolies, and embedded bases have remained.
Alas… there is no free lunch.
Hello,
It seems like low volume might be associated with cities less than 200,000 in population, large nationwide banks are pulling out of small communities because they want a larger volume of accounts that smaller cities do not generate for them. Still, there are a lot of us out there that have no choice but to bank with smaller regional banks and we seem to be the one being penalized because Yodlee does not have a relationship with him. I bank with one of the largest family owned banks in the US but since they are regional and not nationwide, we do not get support from Yodlee. I have changed to this bank in the Spring of 2022 and still yet to get any help on my duplicate transactions that download. Also, how can I recommend Tiller to any of my family or friends who live in our city of less than 200,000 if we can not get adequate support from Yodlee or Tiller, so sad because Tiller has a great product.
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Hi @pjbanman I totally understand your frustration here. It’s not that there is lack of support from Yodlee for these institutions, but that the resolutions may take longer for the really small banks and in any case will likely mean more troubleshooting help from you.
If it’s one of the largest family owned banks in the U.S. I suspect there are lots of users and it may be that Yodlee does have a relationship with that bank. Without the specific name I can’t be sure though.
You mentioned you’ve got a duplicates issue, I’m guessing you’ve written into our team, and maybe we already have an open request with them about it, but if not please write in to us via the chat at https://sheets.tillerhq.com/auth/login
One note is that yodlee does have an issue fixing duplicates if they are generated when the monthly statement is released.
Most of my transactions are with Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature Card. When will that be fixed?
Hi @taylorsteeleweaver - there is currently an active site alert for Fidelity Rewards Signature Visa card. Fidelity sites are switching to requiring two factor authentication. I’d make sure you have 2FA enabled and then try re-connecting that institution on the Tiller Console. If that doesn’t help, please reach out to our support team via chat on the Console at https://sheets.tillerhq.com/auth/login Thanks!