I know it’s a same old conversation of pending transaction where I can see people asking for some change for years and some promise done to improve that many times in past but nothing has changed and it’s not even there in their next year of future plans document so looks like they have taken it granted.
Using Emma for almost 4 years now if anybody ask me which are the two thing which annoyed me the most is how Emma handle(or kind of don’t handle at all) pending transactions and their weekly reports. I have used so many budget apps and I would say all have some kind of pros and cons but how much that issue bothers you in carrying day to day use is the key here and May be that’s why I was never able to make Emma as my first choice of budgeting app and have to keep looking.
How am I suppose to add a receipt, add details notes, split as I don’t know how long pending transaction take to complete, neither Emma send me notification for that transaction after complete. So I kind of have to remember the details and wait for random times and later find that transaction( searching transactions is extremely sluggish as I literally have to pause and stare at screen for app to find the keyword, amount search doesn’t even work). Pending transaction is nothing new and I know the challenges behind it as this could change in different way like date, amount etc. until it is confirmed so app can not finalize it until confirmed by bank. But Emma don’t realize that they have the user on the other end who exactly know how much and where they I spent why not use us to verify the details. If I say the pending transaction is 50 and not 100 means Emma should trust us and later if the complete transaction is not 50 but something else just give me a notification that balance mismatch and I can allow the correction and file the dispute with credit card if needed.
If amount changing is a big issue let us atleast change name, add receipt, split and notes. As those are my own details for my reference. Emma already have a transaction ID and reference name for the transaction which they can use to complete the transaction.
Lastly one more thing that never changed is their useless weekly reports which doesn’t make sense at all but I like that they keep sending this wrong informations every week I could turn it off but idea of that report is not wrong just it’s full of wrong data points. I hope Emma will improve something like Cleo which use much advanced ai to see what’s going on and report me back. They just have to understand that when the report says congratulations for not going this X shop this week, app don’t even realize that I hardly go that shop and might have went 1 or 2 times in whole year so how come that not going there last week is a celebration!
I totally understand your frustration in regards to this issue and I have to admit we haven’t prioritized it much. The main issue is that no matter how we try to solve this, it will break for the majority of users and will cause more issues on our side than benefits on yours.
I think a better solution would be to provide a budgeting card with real-time notifications so people can track everything fast and with high-quality data. We live in a very unfair world and unfortunately, if we don’t own the stack (build a bank), we are limited.
With this said, pending transactions are part of our roadmap and we know there are some banks where it’s much easier to deal with this issue, so we might experiment along the way.
For the reports, we are going to make changes soon. We have been delivering almost a feature a week and we are planning time to refresh them.
Thanks for your reply. The problem with Emma is being UK based, most of the features never reach other countries like Canada. So, like many recent advancements, it is kind of sure that budgeting card or pocket whatever you call it will not be coming to Canada so these features don’t mean anything to us. I have seen Emma opening up a lot in recent times and its good value for the Local people as most of the features are UK only. But you guys should think that you are charging same premium fees to outside UK and value is not increasing much.
I have used YNAB for two years and they have solved this pending transaction issue without any problem and many other apps. so in selling some new stuff not focusing on old sluggish feature which many still rely on is not fair. If I search on this forum for Pending transaction you have told many times that you will work on it but never did! Dont allow us for changing amount but atleast other details I simply dont get how is even possible to rely on this system would love to know what people’s workflow for this…
all the features in the plans are available everywhere - we don’t have UK premium features.
Does YNAB use Plaid? Can you elaborate on this a bit more? Do they match the one you have created offline or you can attach a receipt to a pending transaction?
I mean to say, trading account, pay, etc. Anyway, I dont care what other regions get as thats always the case for any financial institution, and may be thats the reason I ca use many better apps, but those are US only.
Obviously, you might know how YNAB works and who they use, but if you want to know, yes, it’s Plaid only. The thing they do differently is allow manual entry. Where it allows me to enter transaction manually and later date it just matches the transaction from pending or I can even complete the pending transaction and clear that myself as well.
I know if you have not done something for so many years there must be some big reason behind it without just being matching issue or anything else but as many customers do I hope you will figure out something and make life little easier.
I’ve always liked the following idea as a practical (and presumably simple) alternative if it’s not possible to implement direct editing of pending transactions
One more idea I got to improve this if it’s challenging is to have the section of recent transactions like inbox for last 15 days where I can edit that transaction after completion so I kind of know what is pending for additional details or can mark them as clear so it will go to complete or it will automatically go to cleared after 15 days of that transaction. In the background Emma can use them as report as soon as they do but this is just to help user to identify for edit.
@edoardomoreni I’d like to add my support to the contents from @iNil and challenge you to be a little more creative. As they say: necessity is the mother of invention. We users have this need and have solved it. We have no choice: we have either retained the information in our heads (at some risk) to apply when the transaction is confirmed, or we have created manual records elsewhere to remind us. If we can do this manually outside Emma, it’s not so hard to support within Emma: any repeatable process with clear rules (which is the case here) can be coded.
For example, the information entered manually on a pending transaction can be stored as an “annotation”. An annotation can be “linked” to any transaction. If it’s linked to pending transaction that vanishes or changes so that the link cannot be maintained then the annotation becomes orphaned until manually re-linked to another pending or confirmed transaction. The user can categorise the annotation, add notes etc. They can also unlink (orphan) it, or link it to another transaction (pending or confirmed. If it’s linked to a confirmed transaction then it can be applied to (merged into) that transaction. The pending transaction list would contain pending transactions, orphan annotations, and linked pairs displayed in a way that allows them to be easily visually identified:
Pending Transactions
… Shell Transport £60.55
a Next Clothing £21.00 (linked tx+annotation)
… … … Tee shirt for Emily
… Costa Eating Out £7.25
o Tesco Groceries £22.00 (orphaned annotation)
… … … Birthday cake for Emily
Tuesday 23 August
a Leon Expenses £12.50 (linked tx+annotation)
… … … Breakfast
… RAC Insurance £82.99
… … … Breakdown
… Tesco General £21.00
Thumbs up for this thread. When making an expense as a user I want to be able to categorise it / review the categorisation immediately and then move on.
Currently I have to go back and wait until transactions are no longer pending which is a pain.
