Reliability Issues - Transactions

Microsoft Excel
1

I have recently posted about missing transactions. I wanted to add some detail and find out what others do to get around this issue.

The Issue: I noticed that in September, 5 American Express Platinum and 1 Capital One Venture transactions failed to load. The dates where 9/29,9/28 and 9/14.
When I download a new Foundation template, the missing transactions do show up on fill.

So the question is why do they not load into my current sheet. It seems it is either a Yodlee or a TIller issue. This type of problem should be of the highest importance for both Tiller and Yodlee as data integrity is the single most important aspect for each.

Suggestions from Tiller have been either manually import the missing transactions or move to the new spreadsheet. I did manually create the Amex transactions however it was time consuming since Tiller does not provide a tool and also made the inexplicable decision to rearrange the column order in transactions. Also, this is not a great longterm solution as I now have to be ultra diligent on missing transactions and then manually do this process on an ongoing basis.

Okay so what about starting from scratch? I has 4 years of data carefully categorized and I use subcategories of my own design and notes. So the first issues would be getting my old and new transactions merged, eliminating duplicate entries. This would be an ardous task. Also, I have created 5 pivot tables, 5 or 6 new sheets with data and graphs. Importing all of this would be quite time consuming.

Letā€™s say I suck it up and do that. Since I have been on Tiller for 6 months and this happend, should I expect to go through this process regularly? I sure hope not. The real answer is that Tiller needs solve this issue working with Yodlee if necesarry.

Wondering how everyone else is handling this type of frustrating issue.

Thanks, Ken

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1 Like
2

Iā€™ve been using Tiller for a few years now and though Iā€™ve had a few accounts that were slow on getting transactions to me, and a few ā€˜outagesā€™ where accounts werenā€™t able to connect, they always eventually turned up. I donā€™t recall seeing anyone else in the forums having the same issue you are, which makes it seem that whatever is happening is related to your account or spreadsheet.

3

Thanks for your feedback. I understand that you think that my spreadsheet may be the issue. While others have not posted about similar issues, it may be that they are not aware that random transactions are missed. In September, I did not make any changes to my spreadsheet other than to fill and categorize. I struggle to see what could be SPECIFIC to my sheet that causes a random issue like this.

4

I discovered this same issue. I opened my Tiller sheet for the first time in about a week and noticed that prior months data was no longer accurate. I figured out about a weeks worth of transactions had been inexplicably deleted and would not repopulate after running fill. I tried manually adding them and the transactions table totally blows up. I was able to restore a prior version of the sheet to recover the transactions, but now when I open the workbook it sucks my entire CPU and memory unless I set calcs to manual. I spent hours trying to fix this. This product is supposed to make my life easier, not become a second job. Ironically my free trial just ended so now that Iā€™ve paid Tiller the product stops working. Awesomeā€¦

5

Mitch,
Your issue sounds frustrating but appears different from mine.

I have been thinking about how this system likely works. Since a new foundation sheet correctly pulls in all of my data from Yodlee, this problem appears to be within Tiller. The FILL process goes to Yodlee and pulls data and looks to see what is not already in my spreadsheet and fills in the new data. For some reason, this process thinks I already have those 6 transactions so they do not get filled. This seems like a very fixable software problem. Sadly Tiller seems more interested in getting me to start from scratch whenever an error occurs. Hopefully, someone at Tiller can work on solving the actual problem rather than suggesting stop gaps that will take 20-40 hours of my time periodically.

6

I agree that this is a serious issue, but I donā€™t have any good suggestions on how to deal with it. I manually added the transactions that I could not get to fill. I was able to get three of the missing transactions to fill by resorting my transactions and then ā€œFillingā€ again, but this bothered me even more because now I worry that some of the transactions that I manually added will someday reappear. Right now I just donā€™t count on Tiller being accurate.

7

I donā€™t think thatā€™s quite correct. The FILL button in the Excel addin does not go to Yodlee, it goes to whatever Tiller has. The feed from Yodlee to Tiller is happening in the background on a 24-36 hour cycle. You can trigger the fetch from yodlee and your banks via the Tiller console on demand.

for me - the whole data acquisition mechanism has been very reliable lately, no hiccups, just ticking along.

8

This is my point exactly. Yodlee has the data. Tillerā€™s background process that fill only new transactions is buggy and needs to be corrected.

9

Occasionally Iā€™ve had the odd transaction not show up and Iā€™ve had to enter it manually - Iā€™ve been using Tiller for a long time and itā€™s maybe happened with 3-4 transactions. Much more common is that transactions will be duplicated - this has happened dozens of times, usually with my credit card transactions. In order to identify these and other anomalies, Iā€™ve set up a reconciliation worksheet - opening balance at the start of the year, total transactions year to date on each account (from Transactions) and current balance (from the account balance). If there are any differences, I research them. Most often itā€™s just a timing difference and it resolves itself - occasionally itā€™s a missing or duplicated transaction.

10

Thatā€™s a helpful tip and I appreciate your thorough approach, @bardsleyjackie. We strive for accuracy with the feeds and are continually making improvements.