My transaction IDs are not unique

I just noticed that many of the Transaction IDs in my Transactions sheets are not unique. Indeed it seems groups of adjacent transactions have the same Transaction ID, even though they are otherwise unrelated. I’m worried something has gone wrong with the feeds and this will cause problems. How do I fix this?

First, I don’t think this will cause any issues. The Transaction ID is used primarily for support diagnostics; it is not used in most of the tooling/formulas within Google Sheets.

Second, I’m surprised to hear this. I believe the Tiller Money Labs Transaction Splitter will duplicate the Transaction ID but I hadn’t heard of this happening in other cases. Is it possible you copied the Transaction IDs down accidentally? If you want to dig deeper, consider starting & linking a new Tiller Money spreadsheet and confirming that the problematic transactions come in with duplicate Transaction IDs in a fresh spreadsheet.

Hi Randy,

It would be good to know if the Transaction IDs will always be unique by default (e.g. you haven’t used the Transaction Splitter). I use Tiller to feed data to my own personal project, and one of the things I like about the platform is that it inputs data into Google’s very accessible API. I’ve got code running that assumes Transaction IDs are unique; and if they aren’t, then I will miss transactions or potentially double-count them.

Jeff

I totally understand where you are coming from, @Dataphile.

On the other hand, some other users prefer that there is a consistent reference linking both (split) line items to the same transaction.

Honestly, I’m not sure which approach serves more users.

If it is any help, the splitter writes something like “10.74 of -20.74 split from “Ba Bar Seattle WA” transaction on Aug 3, 2020” when a Note column is present. Searching for the words “split from” may help identify split transactions.

thanks for the quick response!

I’m not too familiar with the splitter – does it ever work automatically (i.e. the user hasn’t triggered it somehow?). So long as it’s something that doesn’t happen automatically, and nothing else duplicates Transaction IDs, then I think there shouldn’t be any issue for users like me.

@Dataphile The Splitter can only run as a user initiated process. It just breaks out a transaction among multiple categories. Say you went to Target and spent $100 on groceries, $150 on household goods, and $400 on electronics, the Splitter allows you an easy way to account for each category in your budget.

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Many thanks @aronos. Sounds like there probably won’t be an issue then. Good to know!

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I find the Splitter very useful in my workflow, but being able to retain a unique field would be nice. Many of my splits are for the same amounts (i.e. $1,500 split into three lines of $500), the notes generated by Splitter are all the same. Can you add an index into the note functionality, either hard-coded or as a config variable? For my example, the notes could look like these:

Split 1 of 3: $500.00 of $1,500.00 from “Mobile Deposit” transaction on Aug 3, 2020
Split 2 of 3: $500.00 of $1,500.00 from “Mobile Deposit” transaction on Aug 3, 2020
Split 3 of 3: $500.00 of $1,500.00 from “Mobile Deposit” transaction on Aug 3, 2020

That would really help with my workflow.