Duplicate transactions in investment accounts

DannyB

I've been spending some time editing all the transactions in my investment accounts. I've still got a ways to go but I finished all my June transactions this morning. This afternoon I see that Simplifi has redownloaded all these transactions as "Payment/Deposit and "Uncategorized." The original transactions remain in the register as edited so lots of duplicates now and all the new downloads are back in Other Spending as Uncategorized.

I believe this issue has been raised by another community member and wondering if there is a solution that doesn't include having to individually delete the duplicates.

Coach Natalie

Hello @DannyB,

Thank you for reporting this issue to the Community, although I'm sorry to hear that you're experiencing duplicate Investment Transactions in Simplifi.

To clarify, did the duplicate transactions just happen once, or does it continue to happen (i.e. are they still downloading)? If the former, it would most likely be best to go ahead and delete the duplicates and then keep an eye on things moving forward to see if the issue reoccurs.

If the issue does reoccur, or if the duplicates are continually downloading, we'd definitely want to escalate it to stop it from happening. However, those types of resolutions won't go in and actually remove the duplicates from your Simplifi, so you'd end up needing to delete them regardless. But we definitely don't want the behavior to continue happening, so please be sure to let us know if this is the case.

If you go the delete route for now, I think the easiest way would be to filter the register by "Uncategorized" and then click the box in the column headers to the left of "Date" to select all transactions. You can then click the edit pencil in the upper right and click "Delete Transactions" to delete them all at once. If there are any "Uncategorized" that are not part of the duplicates issue, you can deselect them before deleting. 🙂

-Coach Natalie

Lytol

I just wanted to add on that I've been seeing the same issue as well with investment transactions:

• Transactions are downloaded from my bank/brokerage
• I'll edit the downloaded transactions to properly classify/categorize (often changing from Payment/Deposit to Buy, or similar)
• Everything is great!
• (fast forward a few days)
• The original transactions are re-downloaded and now I have duplicate transactions (the original, edited transactions that are correct + the newly downloaded transactions)
• I delete the newly downloaded transactions
• (rinse and repeat)

It's a fairly minor nuisance in the scheme of things, but just wanted to note that I was also experiencing the issue. If any more information from me would help, just let me know!

Coach Natalie

Hello @Lytol,

Thanks for sharing your experience, although I'm sorry to hear that you're also seeing this issue in Simplifi.

If you're receiving downloaded duplicate Investment Transactions on a regular basis, we can certainly escalate it. I know that Investment Transactions are still being worked on so this behavior very well may improve on its own, however, I don't see any harm in escalating it in the meantime.

With that said, if an escalation is something you'd like to pursue, please let us know as soon as the issue happens again, and don't delete the duplicates so we can gather some details from you. 🙂

-Coach Natalie

Lytol

Hi @Coach Natalie,

Thanks for responding! I'm okay with skipping the escalation, I'd selfishly rather have the correct transactions (even if it requires a bit of manual labor on my part). Like you said, if it's a "known issue", it will hopefully be resolved as the developers continue to work on investment transactions. Thanks again for being so responsive though; it's impressive how active and involved you are in this forum!

DannyB

Hi All ( @Coach Natalie & @Lytol )

I'm back from my trip so I'll take some time to see what's happening with this issue next week when the markets open and I have new transactions to edit.

DannyB

@Coach Natalie

Here is an example of duplicate transactions. I only snipped 3 examples for this from one of our accounts, but, if needed, I can take screen shots of more examples from various accounts.

In the example below, you will notice that there are 3 edited transactions in the amounts of $262.00, $92.34, and $24.97 with appropriate "description/category" and that there are 3 duplicate transactions in the same amounts with the "Description/Category" set to "Uncategorized."

I'm posting this on 6/24 in the AM. I'm going to go ahead and clean these up today and see what happens over the next several days with updates.

Observations:

• I'll keep an eye on this, but the duplicates seem to be limited to a certain time window. That is, the duplicating starts on June 7 in the above example and nothing before that date is duplicated. I'll check my other accounts to see if this is consistent and to see if that window changes as the calendar moves forward, i.e. is the duplicated related a certain time window that includes, say, 15 days of data.
• I'm only showing one day (June 7) in the above example from one account. But, for this account I have completed edits up to 6/15. I have duplicates of all edited transactions form 6/7 - 6/15. All transactions downloaded since 6/16 have no duplicates since I'm guessing, those transactions still match the data being sampled/downloaded.
• The one transaction that is not duplicated is the any transaction categorized "Management fee" which Simplifi also seems to recognize accurately and enters in the register appropriately each month.
• This is probable obvious, but the process for deleting duplicates is to select all duplicates and use "Edit transaction" function to delete all at once. Of course it will be better when this "bug" is worked out and deleting duplicates is no longer necessary.
• Even better will be when Simplifi will be able to memorize the edits and make the edits automatically 🤞
• This observation is just for fun… One of the selling points for Simplifi is that the subscriber can "Stay on top of your finances in under 5 mins per week." Maybe so for someone with a pretty basic financial situation. With investment accounts now more actively integrated into Simplifi and with this current "bug" one will need to check in daily to update investment transactions and delete duplicates or one will spend a bit more than 5 minutes a week keeping this piece cleaned up. 😁

Clark

@dannyb

I have the same problem. Also the bottom of the update screen is cut off on the web version. Not sure what I can fo about this??? Clark

DannyB

@Coach Natalie wrote to @Lytol "I know that Investment Transactions are still being worked on so this behavior very well may improve on its own, however, I don't see any harm in escalating it in the meantime."

Keeping this ongoing work and improvement for Investment Transactions, here is a bit more on my experience. If escalating will speed up the improvement at least as far as keeping track of what data is already downloaded and what is new data, I'm for escalating.

OK, here is another screen shot of the same account that negates my first observation in the last post.

This is May 1 and you can see that I have duplicate transactions that will need to be deleted. I've looked through a couple of my other investment account registers.

The following screenshot is of the same account from this morning (June 24 AM) and shows that when I opened Simplifi this afternoon and it refreshed, I once again had duplicates which I had already deleted earlier today (June 24) and will now need to be deleted again. I will continue working on getting all my past transactions updated to the correct Action, Security/Payee, Description/Category just so that is done, but this problem of redownloading previously downloaded data will put a damper on trying to keep these accounts up-to-date.

Anyway, I'll watch this conversation string to see what you need, @Coach Natalie for the purpose of escalation.

Thanks again for your engagement with all of us in this forum.

SRC54

@DannyB

Good comments from everyone. Yep, I've been doing this a while too.

I actually deleted all my reinvestment transactions in my Fidelity IRA recently, since they are just there for record purposes. However, I did edit my May dividends. I download 14 dividends and buys; then edit the dividends to Reinvestment, which leaves me 7 superfluous buys, which I delete. Those 7 download another time or two, and I delete them. Then on to the next month. It's a minor issue. In the long run, we hope that Simplifi will download them as investments as Quicken does with just 7 Reinvest Dividends, no editing required.

Of course, given Simplifi's philosophy (I think Mint started it) of downloading the Online Balance and accepting it, all cleared transactions are ignored when it comes to the Account balance, so all transactions are just FYI.

And all Investment transactions are cleared (no pending ones allowed). So even when I do a transfer of cash from my Brokerage account or contribute to the IRA, the balance is wrong until the next update. I assume that sooner of later they will allow pending transactions in Investment Accounts.

DannyB

@SRC54

Now that investment account transactions show up in the spending plan under Other Spending, it's become a bit of a bother. I can never tell how my Spending Plan is panning out since I keep jumping from a huge negative available to huge positive available. I.e. right now I'm showing $2732 available and it should be around $700. The extra is because of stuff going on in my retirement accounts that has nothing to do with my day-to-day money matters.

I had completely forgotten that these transactions are basically fyi as you point out so I may simply see about ignoring these accounts for now.

SRC54

@DannyB

If you make them investment transactions, they are ignored in Spending Plan. Only deposits/payments show up in Spending Plan, but you can choose to ignore them too. My brokerage dividends are taxable income, and it is what I live on in retirement, so I need those in the Plan. Reinvestment dividends in IRAs should be ignored, and they will be by default. My IRAs are part of my net worth so I want to see that counted as well.

If you don't have a lot of investment transactions, you can go through and mark them to be ignored in Spending Plan. We all have slightly different needs and philosophies, which is why I like flexibility and being able to exclude/include in the Plan.

My pure investment transactions don't show up in the Spending Plan. You just have to mark them as Buys, Dividends, etc.

Coach Natalie

Hello @DannyB,

Thanks for providing additional info on this!

At this time, if you'd like to ignore Investment Transactions from the Spending Plan, you can do any of the following:

1. Ignore the account from Reports under Settings > Accounts, which will also ignore it from the Spending Plan — https://help.simplifimoney.com/en/articles/5160316-how-to-ignore-accounts-from-reports-and-the-spending-plan
2. Edit each individual Investment Transaction to be ignored from the Spending Plan — https://help.simplifimoney.com/en/articles/3569626-how-to-ignore-transactions-from-reports-and-the-spending-plan
3. Edit the Investment Transactions to the correct investing type so they are no longer a "cash flow" type — https://help.simplifimoney.com/en/articles/6540220-managing-investment-transactions

For number three, as mentioned by @SRC54, true Investment Transactions (Buys, Sells, Dividends) don't show in the Spending Plan at all. I'm not sure if they ever will, but the only ones that can be included for now are "cash flow" types, which include Income Miscellaneous, Miscellaneous Expense, and Payment/Deposit (any that allow a Category).

The problem is that Investment Transactions are all downloading as Payment/Deposit and "Uncategorized". Now that those types of Investment Transactions are included and displayed in the Spending Plan, our users are forced to deal with them to either correct the type to a non-cash flow type or to ignore the transactions from the Spending Plan.

I'm not sure what headway our Product Team has made on the "Uncategorized" issue, but they are aware of it. The good news is they are actively working to ignore Investment Transactions from the Spending Plan by default, which should make things a lot easier —

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/5025/ignore-investment-transactions-from-the-spending-plan-by-default-edited

With all of that said, I will ask that any further discussion regarding Investment Transactions in the Spending Plan, or any other aspect of Investment Transactions, take place in a new thread so as to keep this thread on-topic and able to be easily referenced for the issue at hand (duplicate Investment Transactions).

For the issue with duplicate Investment Transactions, I have reached out to our Product Team to see if they are already aware of the issue, or if we need to submit a bug ticket. If the latter, I'll let you know what I need from you at that time. @Lytol and @SRC54, if either of you are willing, it may be good to gather the data from you as well to show the impact on users.

I'll be in touch as soon as I find out what we're doing with this.

Thanks, everyone!

-Coach Natalie

Coach Natalie

Hello again @DannyB,

I'm going to use your June 7th example from above to submit a bug ticket on this. Although those duplicate transactions have already been deleted, our Product Team should still be able to see them in the system. However, they have asked that you not delete any future duplicate transactions while this issue is being investigated (I'd suggest ignoring the entire account from Reports in the meantime so you're not seeing the duplicates in your Spending Plan).

For the June 7th example (see here), do all three of the duplicate transactions displayed here reside in the same account? If so, please provide the name of the account as it appears in Simplifi. If not, please specify which transactions reside in which account, and what the name of each account is.

Thanks!

-Coach Natalie

DannyB

@Coach Natalie the account for the June 7th example is TAB IRA in Simplifi. It looks like I've already deleted the duplicates in that example. I won't delete anymore for now and I have already ignored these accounts from Reports for the time being.

@SRC54 All but 1 of our investment accounts are IRAs tradition and Roth except one taxable account that are all managed for us. I have a very small personal investment account I use to mirror my grandkid's custodial accounts. I don't need any of them to show up in my Spending Plan and I can set up our monthly retirement draw as a recurring income event without having to deal with the transfer bucket. I have been working on getting caught up with on all the transactions from all accounts but until the duplication issue is resolved, it's just not worth having to clean up 5 separate accounts every day (or at least on days when we have activity in those accounts.)

Coach Natalie

Thank you, @DannyB!

I went ahead and got this reported using the June 7th example. What I'm going to ask of you at this point is to please let us know as soon as this happens again, and don't delete the re-downloaded/duplicate transactions. We'll need the following fresh data:

1. A screenshot of the duplicate transactions, just like the June 7th one above that shows the correct Investing Type transactions and the duplicate Payment/Deposit transactions (or just something that shows the issue and provides specific example transactions).
2. The name of the account the example transactions reside in, as it appears in Simplifi.

I'm hoping providing them with fresh examples that have not been deleted in addition to the original examples will help them debug this issue and see that it is a reoccurring problem.

@Lytol, @SRC54, and @Clark — we can certainly add all of you to the ticket to show that additional users are reporting, but we would need to gather some data from you, and ask that the re-downloaded or duplicate Investment Transactions not be deleted while the issue is being researched. With that said, if any of you would like to participate, you'll want to provide the same info that was requested from @DannyB once a new instance of the behavior occurs.

Thanks all! 🙂

-Coach Natalie

CTP-7104

SRC54

@Coach Natalie

I deleted them earlier this month, and they didn't come back.

FYI, I got a dividend from Schwab IRA yesterday and Simplifi correctly recorded it as Dividend Income. Later today I should get a Buy for the same amount. I'll let you know how that comes in. I think earlier dividends always came in as deposits.

Coach Natalie

Hello All,

I've received an update on the escalation, and it looks like they're working on a fix for this issue. They closed my front-end ticket so I won't be able to track the progress, but rest assured that this behavior will improve for Investment Transactions in Simplifi. 🙂

-Coach Natalie