It’s been frustrating that transactions take a day or so to “confirm” before they are properly integrated into the running analysis, but recently this timescale seems to have extended further which is disrupting the value of the data (expenditure tracking in my case).
For example today is PM on the 25th and I have transactions “pending” from the 19th!
This really has to be improved, if only through the inclusion of an option to include these transaction un-confirmed.
If I’m missing something please let me know, though I am intrigued why this seems to be taking an increasing amount of time for the bank/credit card to confirm.
Thank you
Hi @Grumpy
There are two types of transaction that flow into Snoop from each of the banks/card companies we work with:
- “Booked” transactions (or ‘Confirmed’) which have been recorded on the account and should match your bank statement
- “Pending” transactions which the bank are recording as still subject to change.
Exactly which types of transactions go into Pending and for how long they sit in that status will depend on who the banks is. We don’t have any influence or control on this at all - it’s 100% driven by the banks. For some account providers, we don’t actually get any Pending transactions from them. For those that do provide pending transactions, we see changes to amounts, dates and descriptions during this stage. It’s also possible for a pending transaction to ‘drop off’ and never make it to a confirmed transaction. For all of these reasons, we’ve decided to not use these in our spending analysis or bill features.
We refresh the data with your bank a minimum 2 times per day. You can also manually refresh your accounts in the app whenever you are logged in (by dragging down on the homescreen). When we refresh your data we check for any changes on any recent booked transactions, and each time we also remove all previous pending transactions and import the current pending items.
So if your accounts are refreshing regularly (which you can see from the time at the top of the screen when you tap on an account) we will be showing you the very latest position that your bank is reporting at that refresh time.
It does sound very unusual if you are today seeing Pending transactions still being reported from Saturday 19th. I would need to raise this with the bank to investigate and I’d be very happy to do this if you’d like to email us at hello@snoop.app or tap on the contact us from the app.
Paul
@paul_k I also have a full day where my bank is showing the balance after payments have been taken but Snoop shows them as pending.
Outstanding Bills still shows them as pending and l have a day or two when the outstanding bills and bank balance are double counting bills.
Hi @carlosr - I can see you have 3 accounts connected with us and all 3 were successfully refreshed overnight at these times:
2023-02-21 05:33
2023-02-21 02:40
2023-02-21 00:01
So at those times, the banks were reporting the transactions in the way you are now seeing them. You can ‘pull down’ on the homescreen to refresh your balances and transactions, to see if your banks have changed since that overnight refresh.
We need a transaction to be confirmed by your bank before we will match it to your bills.
Paul
@paul_k l still have an issue with pending transactions.
I have one pending transaction according to my bank but snoop is showing 3 including my salary
Still not sure l understand why snoop continues to show all transactions pending for one day when my bank does not.
Thanks
Hi @carlosr I can see your accounts have updated this morning and I believe you’ve also manually refreshed them at 08:36 this morning.
At that point this morning - NatWest were reporting 3 Pending transactions to us. For clarity, we don’t do any special processing or interpretation on Pending transactions… we just present exactly what we are provided with.
What happens if you do a refresh on your account now - as it’s been nearly 5 hours since you updated your account?
Paul
@paul_k l have refreshed but my bank is showing transactions that are not pending but snoop still shows as pending.
I do find that snoop marks any transaction as pending for 24 hours no matter what the status from the bank
Hi @carlosr we don’t do any processing on Pending transactions at all… we simply show whatever the bank is reporting to us. On each and every refresh, we remove all pending transactions on our side and just import from the bank any that are now being made available to us as Pending.
Is this always NatWest where you have this problem? I can ask them to explain why transactions are being reported via their Open Banking interfaces as Pending but showing as ‘confirmed’ transactions in their own banking app if so.
Paul
@paul_k these ones are for NatWest and it would be useful to understand what the differences are for transaction status in their own app and in Snoop.
If there are others l will keep an eye out.
Hi @carlosr we’ve been investigating this more.
Natwest say this about Pending transactions in their Open Banking data:
Some pending transactions impact the booked balance and available balance as they have immediate value (e.g. cash withdrawals, deposits etc), whilst others only impact the available balance (e.g. pending authorisations which take time to go through the clearing system)
From our testing using their app, although they don’t make it very clear, we can see that transactions like the ones you are reporting are actually still ‘Pending’. For example the below transaction never appeared in the ‘pending’ section in the NatWest app, but was reported as ‘Pending’ for 24 hours by the bank.
We can see a subtle difference in their app from when this status changed. When it was pending, in the NatWest app it looked like this:
When that transaction was reported to us ‘Booked’ (i.e. ‘Confirmed’) the following day, an extra line of information appeared showing the account balance after the transaction had been applied:
We think that is the indicator in the Natwest app as to whether the transaction was in someway still ‘pending’. My bet is that the 3 transactions for you today are in this state (without the balance number showing against it).
Also, based on how they describe Balances & ‘Pending Payments’ in the following screens within their app, I think for whatever reason they only show card payments as Pending. Even though those other bank transfers do sit as pending for a period of time. I’m sure they have a good reason for this, but I’m afraid we can’t tell you what that is. The banks I happen to use don’t do it that way - sadly for us every bank seems to have it’s own approach to balances and pending transactions.
Paul
Hi Paul,
That’s an interesting discovery, though a little disconcerting that there seems to be inconsistent implementation of a ‘standard’ (?) interface by the banks.
Now that this difference is known, is it practical for Snoop to have an advanced option, perhaps enabled in ‘settings’, where users like ourselves could enable immediate inclusion of ‘pending’ items into our transactions?
I guess one of the challenges is what happens if that pending transaction ultimately ‘fails’ to be processed by the bank and is withdrawn?
Andy
Hi @Grumpy I understand exactly where you are coming from, but sadly for us there is nothing that tells us if the transaction is one type of pending or another.
Pending transactions are one of our biggest challenges - mainly because there is no consistency across banks so coming-up with an approach that works for all is tricky. We do have some bank specific processes already on this (and in particular about which balance we use to try and match each bank). However for NatWest for example we can’t tell if it’s a pending transaction that could still change (card authorisations) or one that is not very likely to (the DD example above). Some banks don’t give us Pending transactions at all, some do but they frequently change in description, date or amount before they actual get confirmed to us as ‘booked’.
This particular element isn’t really covered by any UK standard sadly.
Paul
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