So I tried snoop a while ago when there weren’t many supported banks, so didn’t stay. I thought I’d take another look and reinstalled.
A few things straight away
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I’ve only added Nationwide, Revolut and Barclaycard so far, but that is already technically 15+ accounts (mainly Revolut currency accounts). Scrolling through the list in either layout is tedious. It doesn’t help that you can’t hide any accounts either. Please let us group by institution at least.
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Snoop connects to foreign currency accounts, but displays everything as £. So are other currencies just not supported at all? Does snoop treat everything as GBP?
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The text in some snoops is a wall of words. No paragraphing etc. Almost unreadable. Eg the roundup of best savings accounts
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The popup offer suggestions when you open the app are too intrusive. I’ve had the same amazon voucher when you apply for a credit card offer repeatedly too. This alone is probably enough for me to leave again. I understand you need offers to keep the lights on, but users should be able to dismiss them. And bombarding me with credit offers is not very responsible behaviour.
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Regular Payments seems to be broken. The app has picked a seemingly random set of about 40+ “regular” payments. The only common factor being they’re places I’ve shopped more than once eg Tesco. I set about deleting them, but gave up from sheer boredom, as you can only delete one at a time!
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Transfers between your own accounts - ie just shuffling money around - seems to be a bit of bugbear for aggregation. They’re partly what’s messing up the regular payments tracking for me. But also the spending analysis. Of course, it’ll get better if I manually update, but is there a way to hide eg internal transfers from the feed?
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and finally, a pet peeve of mine… Haptic feedback. It’s so annoying, I see red every time I tap in my pin. It’s only snoop and virgin money that somehow do it on my phone. What’s the thinking behind it anyway?! Please at least let me turn it off!
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Hi @Gaoler we really appreciate you taking the time to feedback and for trying out Snoop again. I’ve shared all your feedback with the whole team.
Just a couple of specific points in response:
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Only 3 of the c.60 bank connections we have support non GBP accounts. We don’t support non-GBP accounts yet in Snoop for the simple reason that a lot of our features work across accounts and we’d need a way of converting all numbers to be relative values (e.g. comparing 16,000 Japanese Yen to £100). Rather than blocking these accounts from being connected, we decided to let them be connected and show the correct currency on the homescreen. Especially as it’s so simple to remove accounts again.
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Regular payments: if you could email us from the app and mention me I’d be happy to look at your bills to see what’s wrong. Merchants like Tesco should never appear as a regular payment for example (we block supermarkets, restaurant chains etc). So something must be wrong here.
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If you’ve linked together transfers and marked the category as ‘Transfers’, these will not show-up in the spending analysis. Again I’d be happy to take a look at some examples and explain more if you could contact us from the app?
Paul
Thanks Paul.
So, a few thoughts and roles
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Pop up suggestions and snoops have all disappeared completely now - the app has clearly decided there’s nothing for me! It feels like an improvement… Certainly problem solved at least 
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After adding another account, the Regular Payments flow seemed to reset and this time picked up far fewer false positives. Not really sure whether it was something in the background or something I did 
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Excluding transactions with the Internal Transfers category - it wasn’t immediately obvious to me that you need to link transactions first before changing the category and that the category then excludes them. Can’t snoop pick up the linkable transactions automatically when you are changing the category?
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Is it that hard to convert foreign currencies at midmarket rates eg daily? It’s currently confusing anyway to see the correct currency symbol on the accounts page, but then £ when you look at the transactions in the account.
Silly question, but how do you search for a transaction? Or is transaction search a Pro feature?
Hi @Gaoler
Please let us know if you get any further examples of regular payments that don’t look right and I’ll certainly investigate them for you. There is a ‘something not right’ option on those screens where you can contact us directly from the app.
The ‘linking together transactions’ option is only something that is necessary on transactions that are not matched to ‘merchants’. This normally means person to person bank transfers. We provide the extra option on these ones and our app will scan down similar transaction descriptions and group them together. Once that linking is done, it means you can then change the category on all similarly named transactions in one go.
This is not foolproof because the quality of data we get on these types of transactions is so variable… descriptions often change (as they are often keyed manually) or extra numbers or dates get added by the bank on each one. That’s the reason we don’t do it automatically at the moment. You never need to do this linking step on any regular spending transactions.
Converting currencies is not necessarily difficult - but it’s development that has not been a priority for us above other features. We have a finite development resource and we chose our priorities carefully. Fully supporting Non-GBP accounts haven’t reached the top of that list yet - mainly because so few of the banks we connect with them provide them (only 3) and we only operate in the UK at the moment.
That’s also the case with Transaction Search - it’s not a feature we have yet but it’s certainly on our list for the future.
Paul
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So, I’ve left again, though hopefully not for so long this time.
The bad
No Starling spaces
Crazy categorisation of transactions, but custom categories only available on Pro. Chicken and egg on this - frustrated that the metrics are plain wrong, but makes me less likely to upgrade, not more. I really dislike this paywalling of features that take limited to no development time beyond the default categories.
Snoops are pointless. A link to MSE would give you the same. They just take up head space
Can’t organise my accounts in any way
All the notifications have been pointless and annoying
The good
Fast syncs!
Nice UI, particularly Icons for transaction accounts
I like the analytics. Just they’re all wrong for me. Would be great to have an option to exclude from the analytics page. The first couple of categories are always transfers between my accounts. I’ve also apparently spent £10k on eating out last month
In summary
Even the discounted pro isn’t going to tempt me away from Emma. Why not gamify analytics and have a quick fire five questions when you open the app? Along lines of “which category is right for this transaction?”. I feel like the push to automation rules out human input, but human input is obviously better in many cases, particularly as the user knows their spending better than anyone else…
Thanks for the further feedback @Gaoler
Just one clarification - you can already exclude any transaction from the spending analysis section of the app. Each transaction has a toggle where you can do that (and as previously mentioned we already exclude anything in the transfers category from this analysis).
Paul