I would like to be able to categorise transactions that are in the pending state as opposed to only those that are settled.
The details of a payment/transaction are freshest in my mind soon after I done it. As little as a few days later I often don’t remember and then I have to investigate. I personally like to go through my payments once every few days and carefully categorise everything in order to make my budget alarms have the correct information to work with and trigger in a timely fashion.
Pending payments might not always go through. But realistically… they always do. And even if they don’t, all I lost is a few taps.
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Hi @gabor.biro - the reason we don’t support this today is that sadly pending transactions work differently across banks and there is no relationship between a pending transaction and a confirmed (aka ‘Booked’) transaction a few days later.
Some card companies don’t give us pending transactions at all, some give us transactions that often change in amount, description and date. Most banks don’t provide any sort of reliable reference ID that links transaction records as they move from pending to booked.
As we can’t trace a transaction that starts as pending and then ultimately changes to an entirely different booked transaction, what we have to do is delete all pending transactions and re-import anything still pending from your bank each time we refresh your data.
This is very different to the confirmed transactions which have reliable data and IDs that don’t often change. So we can record data such as notes, categories etc against these records.
I hope that explains why it works like it does?
Paul
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How curious.
Thanks for your reply!
Been a couple of years and just want to check that the above is still the case? Yesterday we went to Costco, four transactions that in the end should be in four different categories… Fuel, takeaway, groceries and shopping. But all pending as the same category.. Would be great to be able to select the category so when it’s confirmed it goes to the right budget. Being purchased on a Friday it won’t confirm until Monday.
No change I’m afraid - pending transactions are still not something we can use use in our spending analysis. We’d need Open Banking industry changes for this to be improved to do this reliably.
Paul
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Such a shame.. Couldn’t you simply just add a caveat that the category may not ‘stick’ to the pending transfer when it’s confirmed and just match the vendor and amount to link the category of the pending to the category of the confirmed. Obvs I get risk that if you have two pending transactions from the same retailer and you specify different categories that they may end up in the wrong budget but I’m sure users would understand and accept…
Hi - it’s not just about the category for us. If we wanted to allow pending transactions into our analysis features for example, it means lots of our features are impacted (spending analysis, bills, budgets, bill forecasting etc). Also things like ‘notes’ can be added to a transaction which again may not be reliably retained.
If we can’t rely on the transaction being something that ‘sticks’ between each time we refresh our accounts, these features can all get into a big muddle and customers would certainly be frustrated with changes they make being lost each time the account updates.
Paul
As always appreciate the engagement. Just struggling to understand that a pending and a confirmed transaction can’t be reliably linked. Surely some type of ‘match’ of vendor and amount would give a high %age reliability so any categorisation / notes could be reliability translated between pending to confirmed transactions.
I for one would definitely accept the risk in adding category / notes to pending that they may not be retained. Honestly the fact that pending transactions are excluded from any analysis and can’t be categorised is more a frustration (well and inability to split transactions over multiple categories but that’s another topic!)
Hi @Tommyp we have to rely on transaction ID numbers to store data against. Those IDs change on pending transactions and in some cases those IDs don’t exist at all when pending.
We can’t rely on ‘Vendor’ because for some banks the payment description changes between when it’s pending to when it becomes booked. Sometimes materially so, depending on the bank. We can’t even rely on amount, because again it can change for some banks.
With the specific bank you use, you might not see these changes in your own transactions. As this is one of the Open Banking standards that is not enforced across all banks. Our solutions have to work for the 60+ connections we support and the tens of millions of global merchants that we get transactions for.
As I explain above - to work around all these challenges, right now all we do is show the pending transactions the bank is reporting and each time we refresh your account we throw those pending items away and get new ones.
Paul
Thanks again, definitely haven’t seen this with Lloyd’s (well Halifax) so shame other banks don’t follow the open banking standards.
Wonder how many of the 60+ connection you support would have to drop to allow only those that follow the standard to be retained?
Thinking it could retain a majority of your users and provide greater functionality to those users… ?
Assume Snoop business model is to focus on numbers of connections vs the quality of those connections…
Agree. I would like to change pending categories at the time they appear, I do sometimes forget 3 days later when they become confirmed. Perhaps being able to amend the notes would be an option, so you can remind yourself to change the category.