I tried to use a smart rule for the first time a few days ago and it failed. Live chat told me to just wait till next month because maybe there just wasn’t enough time between creating the rule and making the transfer.
Having seen this comment I’ve now gone and looked and the transfer from my Starling account just shows the payee (i.e. my name as it was a transfer to an offline savings account) in the block text right at the bottom of the transaction details page. It doesn’t seem that the transaction reference I put in in Starling comes through at all? Does smart rules not work for transfers to/from Starling?
Hey @Greg
What @Gaoler and @o99 said is correct. Really its an issue that starling gives us their transaction data in a different way to other banks. So their reference goes into a different field to other banks. We have an update to the smart rules which will allow you to put a filter on that field instead and should solve your problem. Sorry for the delay, it will be out soon!
I am finding it annoying too because i use starling for most of my banking! If you are looking for some specific payments you can see if you can make it work with the advanced filters alone in the mean time.
But once you know where banks put their reference data, can’t you just map it to anywhere you want in Emma?
For example, couldn’t there be a Emma-defined bank transfer reference field which is shown inside the UI of the Emma app and which Smart rules operates on? What bank-specific field gets mapped to the reference field in Emma could presumably vary from bank-to-bank.
Requiring the user to be aware that Monzo and Starling put reference info in a “details” field and then use advanced filters to pick this up surely makes things more demanding and complicated from user perspective?
Yes this is a good point, and is definitely another option. However, it’s not quite as simple as changing the mapping. Because not all Monzo and starling transactions work in this way. Standard purchases seem to use the reference as expected (and should appear in the app as expected). I also think some transactions from Monzo may have no reference information given to us at all.
However, you are right, if we can get the best data in the best fields, that would definitely be the optimal solution.
And you may not need to use the “details” field at all, but there will always be edge-cases where it may be useful.
Just a quick FYI to say that if you’re new to using Smart Rules we’ve published a blog post that explains it in a little more detail (how they work and how you can create a new rule)
Smart rules are pretty good. Someone else may have mentioned it but it would be good to be able to expand the scope of the filters. For example right now it’s just using the transaction ref for the syntax search. But it would be good if it were possible to search transaction name. Or the reference I typed. The reason is I have one or two things I’d like to apply smart rules too but can’t because the reference of the payment on the transaction is my name. So it doesn’t filter properly.
The other thing that might be worth looking into is an option on a transaction to “make smart rule” or “us this transaction for smart rule”
Kinda the other way around than having to go to the pro section. Also a good opportunity for an upsell to non pro users.
At the moment, you can only play around with the dates filter to try and get around it.
This came up when the beta was launched. I think adding a link to the transaction screen would be a bit messy, but it should definitely be able to pick a transaction from a list to start creating a rule
Date filters didn’t seem to fix it for me as I make quite a few transfers between my accounts. Basically I need something I can rely on.
Not sure adding another option on the list of six they already have makes mess. But I’m sure they have a team to try things out and find a better home for it. At least I hope they do!
The other thing we are considering is how to expand “Smart Rules”.
We kept this very generic because detecting transfers is just one of the many use cases we can implement. This could extend to detailed tagging, triggers and reminders.
