All my transactions sync into Emma… Emma uses the categories that I’ve used before for my future transactions. That’s working perfectly. Still I need to adjust categories for a lot of transactions. I use Paypal a lot – the same Paypal transaction – but it can be shopping, bills even groceries. Hardware stores – are shopping in general. But sometimes I want to put that expense against a project category. Or maybe entertainment. I don’t use the app everyday. I may open it once in a couple of weeks. I would like to open it – quickly review my NEW transactions (since last review). Adjust categories. Click Review Complete. And then I will look at my budgets. Today I look at the budgets. Transactions are all over the place. I have to almost review them all every time. Otherwise my budgets look off.
What do others think? Am I the only control freak in here?
Hmm this is an interesting idea - I’m just wondering how we would manage it so that it didn’t create more work? i.e. if you had to approve every transaction then would this take longer than just scanning through your transaction list once in a while?
We are planning to add a “notifications” section on the feed tab so it could potentially be included somewhere here, but not quite sure how!
Personally, I wouldn’t want something where you were forced to approve every transaction. When I was comparing aggregators before settling on Emma there was one I tried where you had to approve every transaction that came in. I hated that about it. I think it was either Moneyhub or Money dashboard.
But some optional visual indicator of what are the new transactions since you last opened the app might be interesting. Perhaps bolder text or slightly different background colour for new transactions in the feed. Or perhaps a way to jump to the point in the feed you were at when you last opened the app.
Definitely something simple. Say I have 10 new transactions. I might want to change the category on only 2 or 3. I agree Feed is the most appropriate place for it. New Transactions widget. I would keep transactions in that list until I actually go in it. I.e. If I open Emma and I did not review New transactions – these transactions are still “new”. I may open Emma for other things. I may get distracted. Etc. I would like to have a button at the top of that list: “Approve” / “Pass” / “Reviewed” / “Post” / “Mark as read”. Whatever it is called. When I tap the button – it clears the list. I.e. in the background each transaction has “reviewed” flag. It may be a pending transaction from a credit card. Does not matter. If I accepted (or adjusted) this transaction as Grocery spending – I don’t want to see it in the “New Transactions” list anymore. But until I hit that “Approve” – I would like to see it there. Otherwise I am still not sure that my spending is in the right bucket. That’s really my goal: I want all my spending to be assigned to the correct budget.
In addition… since I understand some people are OK with 80% results from the auto-assignment… It would be nice if users can control what widgets they see in the Feed. Like a little X icon in the corner of each widget panel. Some people are happy with the Recent Transactions widget that is already available in Emma. Some people will be using “New Transactions”. I can’t imagine somebody using both.
