Linked Transactions

When I transfer money between my banks Emma sometimes creates a link between the outgoing transaction on one account and the incoming transaction on another account. I really like this feature as it makes it easier to keep track of movement of money between accounts when reviewing previous transactions.

However, Emma doesn’t always automatically recognize linked transactions.

I think it would be good if we could manually nominate linked transactions when the app has not picked up on it automatically.

A lot of work has gone into improving our internal transfer recognition, which should be out soon and should hopefully go a long way in making sure that we get almost all of the internal transfers :grin:.
As for the nominated linking, maybe @boldi24 has something to say, I think he wrote most of the new internal recognition system.

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You can do this by moving the + and - transactions in Excluded. :wink:

The app learns, so after a couple of edits, you are good to go.

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I have at least two regular transfers between my accounts that have been happening for several months that I think get autocategorised as excluded but the relevant incoming and outgoing transactions don’t get linked. In this case it would be nice to be able to tell the app which transactions should be linked because it doesn’t seem to have figured out for itself.

As long as they get categorised correctly, you are good to go.

The linking bit doesn’t do anything, even when we show it, this has 0 impact on the app. In this case, the app is relying on your categorisation, but there is no logic implemented that looks for a link.

My point is the linking is useful (for me anyway). When it works I like that I can quickly identify where an internal transfer came from or went to. If the linking is not working this isn’t always obvious if you do several internal transfers.

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Thanks for explaining. :slight_smile:

Linking is a bit trivial, we do it for refunds too and sometimes we link stuff that is completely unrelated. At the beginning we thought it was a nice touch, but it seems some people want to have the ability to link / unlink, even though it has zero effect on the stats.

When I was deciding which app to use for account aggregation purposes it was one of the things which stood out for me as unique against other similar apps (Yolt, etc).

Thanks, that’s great to know. :wink:

We are obsessed about Excluding things that are internal.

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Some cashback on my Amex has been linked to a totally unrelated transaction. How do you unlink?

There is no way to unlink as of today and it also doesn’t affect anything in the app. :sweat_smile:

I am so close to killing this feature. lol

I guess you mean it doesn’t effect things from an analytics/budgeting perspective?

However, I would say it has a positive effect on my user experience (when it works correctly): it makes it much easier to trace the source and sink of an internal transfer than it would be if the feature didn’t exist.

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Yes, it has 0 effect and you only see it if you click on the transaction.

It’s really a guess we make and 90% of the times, it’s mostly right.

We can even implement the logic to make it unlink/link it, this is not that difficult. The issue is that it’s not really a feature. :sweat_smile: Like you would see this only in the transaction view.

I’ve created categories to try and get some clarity on internal transfers, but my system doesn’t work very well, because it catches some false positives, ie transactions that are not actually internal or that are with a different account.

I’d love to see transactions between accounts as a two-column reconciled list, rather than have hundreds of excluded transactions, some of which are not correctly reconciled, like the above Amex transaction

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The fact is linked, it shouldn’t affect the category.

You can still have linked stuff in groceries.

If it’s in Excluded, we need to check and resolve. :sweat_smile:

Yes, I’d like to see something like this too

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What about the Excluded category in analytics? ehhee

I have/had a long list of excluded transactions. It was really hard to find out what each transaction was. Seeing just the reference (not payee name or account from/to) is very confusing.

Mass excluding items also tends to exclude too much, because it only seems to look at the payment references, which are often not very descriptive for transfers between my own accounts :wink:. Particularly as the full name is now needed for some payments, so I have lots of payments with just my name as reference :joy:

I think once you’ve got 3+ accounts, there has to be some categorisation at the account level.

For example, I want to see the net amount I put into a savings account each month, so I un-exclude those transactions. But what I get is an income item and the outgoing payments in my Savings category as an expense… It messes up the analytics too.

What I want is a single monthly figure for my net amount going into or coming out of the savings account.

There are lots of problems like this that I think a greater focus on the accounts level would easily solve.

The transaction above was actually Amex cashback linked to a random transaction with a matching amount, because Emma assumed all payments into a credit card are from me. So some more intelligent understanding of the nature of transactions for account types would also be great…

You can simply leave everything as it is and focus on the left to spend starting from total of income. That’s the saved amount. :stuck_out_tongue: