Venmo transaction details are very limited.
What can we do to get them to include more details like who the money was sent to?
Is this something we can push Venmo to solve?
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Funny enough I have the same ask from Amazon. I get nearly everything on there (even food) but it only comes across as “Amazon” so its impossible to reconcile into accurate categories w/o a lot of manual work.
I don’t need a whole item description, but I wish at a minimum it would be like a grocery store where it would say Amazon: “insert cryptic description here” at least. That would have issue on a multiple item order, so I do “get it” how difficult it is though. Venmo seems a lot easier for sure.
Actually, I was thinking about this some more.
I think this is something that can be solved by Tiller developers.
Places like Venmo and Amazon have APIs. Tiller could use those APIs to pull customer transactions in and use that data to cross-reference transactions from our financial institution.
Not sure if this is something Tiller devs would have interest in doing though. It would be very helpful/nice.
Ha. I saw Venmo listed in Tiller’s list so I thought I would try it out. It imports data but only the note, not the person you Venmoed. Silly!
@imthenachoman My hacks for these two issues are:
Venmo – use your bank debit card instead of ACH transfer to pull in the name of the person you Venmo’ed money to. No fee either way, but the debit card transaction will pull in more details. This will show up in your bank feed data – you don’t need to connect Venmo.
Amazon – use the Amazon (Synchrony) store card to make your purchases, and order one item at a time “buy it now” or related groupings of items together that you want to categorize as one line item. (Amazon will most often still send your multiple orders in one package if you order several orders right in a row, in my experience.) This will pull your item description into your Tiller description field for easier categorization.
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@Rocketghost What I do for this grocery vs. other Amazon issue is that I have two credit cards in my Amazon account. When I use one (the Amazon Synchrony Store Card), I have Tiller AutoCat that to “Amazon” if I don’t have specific rules for that type of transaction (e.g. frequent enough Amazon purchases like diapers and cat food that I have specific transaction description rules created), and when I use the other (the Amazon Chase Credit Card), I have Tiller AutoCat that to Groceries. This way I can see what are my Whole Foods purchases easily categorized as Groceries even though the description alone is not helpful and just says Amazon. You can replicate this same thing even without any Amazon cards – just having two different forms of payment in your Amazon account and designating one for groceries and one for everything else.
Interesting. Let me change that in Venmo. Thanks!
Let me know if it works for you too. I recently discovered this and have tried it with a small handful of my clients, but I’m not yet sure it’s universally true across all banks (hoping it is).
I noticed that the Venmo statements, if downloaded as a CSV include more information like the recipient/sender and the funding account. The CSV import flow seems to ignore the funding account field, though.
I don’t know if those are in the data feed used when connecting through Yodlee, though. If they are, it would be really nice to concatenate the description from recipient/sender + message, and to populate the Account # field with the funding source.
What I’m really trying to do is AutoCat certain transactions as business expenses, based on the funding source of the Venmo transaction. The data to do that is there in the statement CSV, which makes me think it’s probably there through the Yodlee data, too.
How do we find out if this is something that Tiller has access to but just isn’t using, or something entirely unavailable to Tiller?
Yodlee uses screen scraping for the Venmo connection, so they are not grabbing that statement CSV. The data pulled is just whatever/however it’s displayed at the Venmo site on the Transaction page.
Really? Wow.
Well, then they could grab other data on the transaction page – like the name of the person and the note/comment.
It’s true they could probably grab more data, but what we get is what we get 