Loving snoop so far after using it a couple months, it’s helped me keep a better handle on my household’s spending and find some good deals to switch to, so thanks for that!
One thing that still bothers me though is the “top-level” view of my accounts, cards, and combined balance, none of which include pending transactions.
It’s very rare (for me at least) that a pending transaction on a card or account won’t eventually settle, and in some cases it can take 3-4 days before this happens, which gives an inflated view of how much hard cash I have on hand unless I view each of my accounts and cards individually and do some mental math…
Doing this constant mental arithmetic is the reason I decided to give snoop a try…I really just want a conservative way of knowing how much cash I have available.
Appreciate my use case isn’t going to appeal to everyone, is this something that could be added as an optional feature that can be toggled from the settings?
Thanks for the feedback on this. We actually have different treatment for Pending Transactions depending on the bank they originate from. For the ‘top level view’ that you mention - where we show balances on the homescreen for example, we always try and match the balance that the bank gives you in their own app. If you don’t think the balances are matching for you, I’d be grateful if you can contact us from the app so we can check your account details.
We actually get two balances from many banks - and even when we get a single balance, the one they give us is not always on the same basis across all banks. One big banking group show a balance with all card payments already deducted, another one shows the ‘cleared’ (or ‘Booked’) balance but still give us a list of pending transactions. So we try and apply bank specific logic based on what we think they are showing.
As with most things in banking - it’s not always that simple as certain banks do things in more complicated ways. For example my bank includes pending card payments but not other pending transaction types (even though they appear in my banking app as pending)
For other features in Snoop - in the spending analysis or your bills for example we don’t currently include pending transactions. That’s because many pending transactions change either date, amount or description… plus many drop-off before they become booked. Also the banks don’t give us any reliable way to spot a pending transaction that we had yesterday for example is the same as a ‘cleared’ transaction we had today. This means we have to basically delete and re-load all pending transactions each time we refresh your account.
Many thanks @paul_k for your reply, yes that makes perfect sense. As always there’s an iceberg beneath what looks like a simple feature on the surface!
