Fidelity Visa (or Elan Financial) Balancing Transaction Issue

HeathJ

After a few days of a legitimate transaction using my card, Simplifi records another positive transaction of the same amount. This is makes my spending inaccurate. Any ideas on whether this is a Quicken/Fidelity/Elan issue? Any ideas on how to make it work? Right now, all I can think of is manually selecting transactions that are >0, making sure its not a refund or credit card payment, and changing the category to Transfer. Before answering, please check out these bullets.

• I am not referencing a Credit Card Payment
• These are not refunds, although they look just like one.
• I cannot create a payee rule, as it would be manual for each payee and it would affect the actual expenses.
• I cannot create a category rule, same as above.

Coach Natalie

Helllo @HeathJ,

Thank you for posting to the Community regarding this issue, although I'm sorry to hear that you're experiencing this behavior in Simplifi. 

To clarify, you're receiving a duplicate downloaded entry for expense transactions, and the duplicate is a positive amount, correct? If so, please take a look at the information outlined here as far as how to determine the entry method of the transactions, as well as view the "Appears on your statement as..." info for each of the duplicates. Do both instances of the duplicate transactions have the same "Appears on your statement as..." info? 

I'd say an easier way to resolve this would be to simply delete the incorrect duplicate entry. However, it sounds like something like this should most likely be escalated. First, please let us know how it goes when reviewing the Support Article!

-Coach Natalie

HeathJ

Thanks for the reply, @Coach Natalie. That article is insightful and its good to know its there. I went through the exercise of reviewing 5 of the positive transactions and they were all the same. I do not manually add expenses, so I was quite sure they would all show up as "Appears on your Fidelity Visa statement as." I like the idea of deleting the duplicates, but there are two issues. 1. I think they are balancing entries, rather than duplicates and 2. This would be a daily manual task. Rather than delete, I sorted by amount and multi-edited each one to "Transfer." It leaves them on the account, but removes from expenses. Let me know if you can think of anything else or if there is anything that I can do to help you escalate this. For the record, I also have multiple credit card accounts and this is the only one that has the issue.

Coach Natalie

Hello @HeathJ,

Thanks for checking out some of the transactions and posting back!

I'm a little confused as to how these would be balancing transactions. Simplifi doesn't add balancing transactions for you; your account register in Simplifi should exactly match the transactions on the bank's website if the account is connected to the bank and you're solely downloading transactions (as opposed to doing manual entry). Do you see the positive transactions on the bank's website? 

Also, if you're assigning the transactions as 'Transfers' and you're linking the positive and negative transactions together, this would undo any spending that occurred and cause inaccurate reporting and budgeting. This sounds like a duplicate transactions issue where you'd want to delete the duplicate income transactions to correct the issue. Deleting the duplicate income transaction would allow you to properly track your spending, and have an accurate account register. 

However, I'd like to escalate this issue. To do so, please provide the following information: 

1. The name of the account that the transactions reside in, as it appears in Simplifi. 
2. The Date, Payee, and Amount of a few transactions in Simplifi that are duplicated with an income transaction.
3. The current balance of the account, as displayed on the bank's website. 
4. The current balance of the account, as displayed in Simplifi.
5. A screenshot of the Transaction Detail window for a few of the duplicate transactions that include both the income and expense transactions for each example. 

Thanks in advance!

-Coach Natalie