Money Feeds Add-on help troubleshooting broken automatic updates

Ask Anything
, ,
1

I’ve been using Tiller for over a year now and it’s been a great resource to help manage my finances. With all the new features being built around the add-ons I decided to start a new worksheet using the feeds instead of the Feedbot. However, I’ve found that I’ve been unable to get any automatic updates on the worksheet using the feed while the Feedbot worksheet successfully pulls in new transactions automatically. When I do manually refresh the feed, the transactions are pulled in.

Are there any new limitations in the Transactions worksheet that may be causing this? Has anyone else had this issue? I do use array formulas in the Transactions worksheet and haven’t had any issues on my old worksheet but I’m wondering if there is something unique to the feed.

2

@stephenk do you typically access the Feed Bot sheet from the Tiller Console? I’m thinking this may be due to the security settings at your bank that require you to visit the Tiller Console in order to refresh your accounts. If the accounts aren’t refreshed at the time the Auto Update runs due to these settings it wouldn’t have any data available to pull in and that’s why you’d see the manual update working.

3

I usually go through the console but sometimes I have the sheet still open. So if what you are saying is true, does that mean there’s not really any way for me to get automated updates? Essentially I would have to visit the console to get Tiller access to updated data, wait until the Auto Update runs the following day, and only then would I get an update?

4

That’s correct @stephenk. Visiting the Console initiates the refresh, which makes the data available in our system for manual update via the Tiller Money Feeds add-on or the Auto Update the next day.

5

Are there any plans to develop a more hands off solution to refreshing this data?

6

After using it another day I’m certain that this is a major step backwards from the original solution at least for how I use this service. My number one request to improve my Tiller experience would be for fresher data and this literally adds a 24 hour delay to my routine to use the new money feed.

7

The following is my opinion:

I think a lot of people agree with you. I read everything written by this community. The two big things I see are (1) better, faster, improved feeds, 2FA, Tiller Console, etc. and (2) pending transactions. I know they are working hard on #1 and hopefully come around soon regarding #2. Now days, speed is everything. And I mean a few seconds, not many seconds, not minutes, not hours, and not days. No one has any patience anymore. If people do not get their speed, they will start looking elsewhere and may/will eventually leave. The Tiller people are start. Tiller is always asking it’s customers what they want and what is important to them and then generally speaking they move in that direction. If the users keep the pressure on, I have a feeling that Tiller will accommodate.

Blake

8

@stephenk it doesn’t add a 24 hour delay but maybe adds an extra step.

  1. We have to be able to refresh the data. If you have 2FA turned on or the bank expects it to be turned on you need to visit the Console and possibly refresh (under Account Summary) maybe you’re already doing this.
  2. Update your sheet by launching the Tiller Money Feeds add-on and click Update sheets.

That’s it. It’s not delayed it’s just when the Auto Update runs its not been pulled into our database.

Does that help?

I do take your feedback to heart though and we hope to improve the experience, but there are numerous variables at play here and it’s not a simple thing to change. Moving away from the Feed Bot approach was a conscious choice due to needing a system that would scale better as we grow our customer base. Feeding data via an add-on had many benefits (not just for us but customers as well) that far outweighed the tradeoff of giving customers the extra step of clicking a button to get their data into a Google Sheet.

9

Just to confirm, if auto-update is enabled in settings and if my accounts don’t have 2FA turned on, then my transactions should update automatically without any manual intervention. Is that correct?

Or do I always need to manually click Update sheets?

And thanks for the context Heather. Tiller has been a critical tool over the past year in improving my personal finances and I’m looking forward to the continued improvements in the upcoming year.

10

@stephenk yes, but with lots of caveats.

First, the Auto Update feature runs at a specific time every day, I think 2AM (somewhere - I don’t know if that’s 2AM local time or 2AM EST - it seems to be consistently around 2AM for me, but I’m on the East coast USA).

Let’s say you do not have 2FA turned on for ANY account, and none of your institutions EXPECT you to have any multi-factor authentication turned on. Generally, if your refreshes don’t happen until 3AM then the Auto Update wouldn’t have anything to bring in BUT if the daily email goes out at 8AM you would see the transactions in the daily email, but not the sheet.

Second, and to get even more detailed with how it all works right now, and this is an industry level thing that most 3rd party tools (like Tiller Money and Personal Capital) using Yodlee (our data provider) have to try and work around:

Some institutions require or expect some type of multi-factor authentication to be turned on (MFA) even if you do not have it turned on. These institutions have a “MFA Credentials” auth type. Some institutions have Auto Refresh enabled or disabled depending on the refresh health of the institution. There is a global Auto Refresh status and a individual user login Auto Refresh status. So Chase could globally have Auto Refresh enabled, but your particular login might not have it enabled because it consistently fails. Right now about 45% (and growing) of Yodlee’s supported institutions use the MFA Credentials auth type with Auto Refresh enabled at the Institution level.

For MFA requirements, this might be 2FA codes (most secure). It could also be security questions (e.g. where did you go to high school?) (medium secure). If it’s security questions, and Yodlee learns all the answers AND Auto Refresh is enabled for your login our system can pull the data without you visiting the console. If this happens before 2AM the Auto Update can grab it and put it in your sheet. If Auto Refresh is disabled you will have to visit the console to refresh and then manually update your sheet afterward. If you have 2FA on for your account it doesn’t matter if Auto Refresh is enabled or disabled, you will have to visit the console to refresh.

In any scenario where visiting the console is required to refresh, Auto Update can’t pull the data without your intervention so you need to manually update your sheet.

Each institution has different auth requirements and Auto Refresh statuses that change. One month Auto Update might be enabled, the next it’s not, and then the next it’s re-enabled. The landscape is constantly changing and we’re seeing more and more institutions moving from “Credentials” auth type, which is just username and password and much less secure, to “MFA Credentials” - this is likely the case with Capital One and the change in behavior we’ve seen over the last several months, though I don’t have the historical statuses to prove that.

It’s all compounded by our specific implementation of the API to move data from Yodlee (who grabs it from your bank) into a spreadsheet. That’s why the experience for Personal Capital can be vastly different than the experience with Tiller. Personal Capital has probably 20+ engineers dedicated to this type of work. We have roughly 3.

Anyway, the improvements we hope to make are focused on improving/stabilizing the integration, helping customers understand the auth and refresh requirements expected by the bank, making the re-auth experience more seamless/quicker, and clearing up confusion about our own “Auto Update” feature in Tiller Money Feeds.

Hopefully that helps paint the picture a little more clearly that we’re trying to work with at an industry level.

Thanks for being a loyal and engaged customer and let me know if you have other questions.

Heather

11

Thank you very much for the detailed explanation. That makes a lot of sense how it varies from account to account. My confusion was more due to me maintaining two nearly identical worksheets, one using the old Tiller Feed Bot for updates and a new version that uses the Money Feeds where the Tiller Feed Bot was pulling in updates automatically but the worksheet using Money Feeds had not successfully pulled in updates without manual intervention. I had setup the duplicate worksheets to evaluate the new feed and new tools in Labs while keeping the option to stay with my original worksheet using the TillerBot if I didn’t find the new features valuable for my workflow.

However, I’m unable to evaluate this as more recently my entire account seems to be having technical issues. Neither feed is updating and I’m running into new account validation issues that I haven’t seen before. I have an open thread with you over support so hopefully this can be resolved soon.