Duplicate transactions with Alliant Visa (edited)

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We use our Alliant Visa a lot, it's our primary card. We've noticed that duplicate transactions will appear days or even weeks later. As in, the transaction will come in from Alliant automatically, then some time later the same transaction will appear, again coming from Alliant automatically.

It doesn't happen with every Alliant transaction but it does with a lot of them. It doesn't happen on any sort of predictable timeframe. Sometimes the second transaction has a different date from the first, so I thought maybe it happened when a transaction went from pending to complete, but no that's not it. I've had duplicate transactions show up from previous months several weeks after they post. Then I thought maybe it had to do with categorizing a transaction while it was still Pending, but that's also not the case. I can't spot any pattern to it.

My workflow now is as follows:
* Watch for and categorize transactions daily or close to daily. If I spot a duplicate, delete it right away
* At the end of the month I try to review all transactions for the Alliant Visa manually and look for any duplications. Since Simplifi doesn't let me both sort by amount and filter by a custom date range, I have to browse through the whole month and look for the same transaction amount when they are near one another date-wise. Unfortunately, this misses cases where the transaction was made near the end of a month, because the duplicate transaction might have a later date than the original.
* Close out my spending plan by ensuring ALL transactions are accounted for with an expense, and all expenses have excessed budget released for spending.
* Each time I login to Simplifi, I click back through previous months in the Spending plan. If anything shows up now as over budget or in the Other Spending, I know it's a duplicate that showed up out of nowhere.

This workflow is very annoying.

I'm not the only one. Others have had this issue as well, dating back to at least July 2022 for the post below, but he says he's been having the issue since January of that year. So really, it's been over 2 years with no fix.

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  • Coach Jon
    Coach Jon Moderator admin
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    Hello @TheHikingViking,

    Thanks for posting to the community! We can definitely help you troubleshoot these duplicate transactions that are appearing. First, you will want to confirm whether the transactions are downloaded from your bank or manually entered by confirming the Entry Method. If you've determined that one of the duplicate transactions was downloaded from the bank and the other one was manually entered, you can merge the two transactions so they become a single transaction, or you can delete one of the duplicates instead. We hope this helps, and please let us know how this goes for you!

    Thanks,

    Coach Jon

  • TheHikingViking
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    @Coach Jon as I mentioned in my original post, these transactions are downloaded automatically.

    Though not always, they most commonly appear about 30 days after the original transaction. The date of the duplicate is not 30 days later than it should be, but the duplicate just often seems to appear about 30 days after the original.

    I have been deleting them. This is a laborious and annoying process and prone to human error. Especially when Simplifi auto-assigns the duplicate transaction to a category other than the one I manually assigned when it was originally imported. For example, I buy Groceries at WalMart one day, so I categorize that transaction as Groceries. Then some time later the duplicate transaction magically shows up under Shopping. It can be hard to catch that there is even a duplicate in this case and it throws my budget off!

    If this was a rare occurrence that would be one thing, but the fact that it's commonplace with Alliant Visa transactions tells me something is broken within the system and needs someone to look into how to fix it.

    More recently I've been categorizing these duplicates into a special category and hiding them in case you ever wanted to look at these records in my account to help with debugging.

  • Coach Jon
    Coach Jon Moderator admin
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    Hello @TheHikingViking,

    Thanks for letting us know. I would suggest waiting for the issue to happen again, and get back to us with 3 examples showing the Date, Payee, and Amount so we can verify what is happening on our side. Please let us know!

    Thanks,

    Coach Jon

  • TheHikingViking
    TheHikingViking Member
    edited March 31
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    @Coach Jon I've been watching closely and it definitely seems to happen around the 30 day mark most often.

    Here are some examples:
    * 3/3/24 - Safeway - $60.65
    * 3/1/24 - Wdsdot - $8.50
    * 3/1/24 - Barb & Eds - $25.00
    * 2/29/24 - Wal-mart - $38.81
    * 2/23/24 - Basin Street Espresso - $15.03
    * 2/22/24 - Elemental Pizza - $139.11

    That's a small sample of the transactions I saved. The total number of overall duplicates this year has to be around 50 or more.

  • Coach Natalie
    Coach Natalie Administrator, Moderator admin
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    @TheHikingViking, thanks for the examples!

    I found an existing ticket for this issue with Alliant Credit Union that was reported by another user. I'd like to get you added to the ticket, and need the following additional data to do so:

    1. The name of the account the transactions reside in, as it appears in Quicken Simplifi.
    2. A screenshot of the Transaction Detail window for only 3 of the example transactions so we can see that Date, Payee, Amount, and the "Appears on your statement as…" info".
    3. A screenshot of your account register in Quicken Simplifi where the example duplicate transactions reside showing that they are a duplicate of another entry.

    Please also submit your logs via the 'Send Feedback' option:

    1. Log into the Quicken Simplifi Web App.
    2. Select Profile from the left-hand navigation bar.
    3. With the Profile menu open, hold down the Option key for Mac or the Alt key for Windows, and then click Send Feedback
    4. Leave all boxes checked, add a brief description of the issue, and then click Send.

    Much appreciated!

    -Coach Natalie

    CTP-9317

  • simplira
    simplira Member ✭✭
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    Hi,

    I was looking at monthly summary and noticed that Jan looked high on spending side and as I looked further all transactions in Jan for Alliant Visa were duplicated. Both transactions show downloaded from bank, so I can’t even mark them duplicate. So 2 questions:

    1. Was there a bug with Alliant Visa that was fixed?
    2. If I delete one of those, which one to delete and would they not come back?

    Thanks,

  • glkappe
    glkappe Member
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    i have been with alliant for several years now and at some point last year the credit card starting duplicating a few transactions in quicken classic each time i do a download kf transactions. Very frustrating to know that i have to go find these duplicates each time to reconcile. I know i can delete the account and start over, which ive done before, but i know itll come back so i hust deal with it.

  • Coach Natalie
    Coach Natalie Administrator, Moderator admin
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    @simplira & @glkappe, thanks for posting to the Community!

    I went ahead and merged your discussion with the existing thread for this topic. As mentioned above, I'd like to get some additional users added to the existing ticket for this issue, and need the following info to do so:

    1. The name of the account the transactions reside in, as it appears in Quicken Simplifi.
    2. A screenshot of the Transaction Detail window for only 3 of the example transactions so we can see that Date, Payee, Amount, and the "Appears on your statement as…" info".
    3. A screenshot of your account register in Quicken Simplifi where the example duplicate transactions reside showing that they are a duplicate of another entry.

    Please also submit your logs via the 'Send Feedback' option:

    1. Log into the Quicken Simplifi Web App.
    2. Select Profile from the left-hand navigation bar.
    3. With the Profile menu open, hold down the Option key for Mac or the Alt key for Windows, and then click Send Feedback
    4. Leave all boxes checked, add a brief description of the issue, and then click Send

    We look forward to your reply!

    -Coach Natalie

  • TheHikingViking
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    @simplira no, it has not been fixed. It happens every single month for me. Most commonly when the transaction is about 1 month old. But not always, and not for every transaction.

    If you delete one of them they shouldn't come back.

    I've had to take the somewhat drastic tactic of putting virtually all alliant visa transactions as uncategorized by default (hard, because it's per-vendor not per-payment type). This way when an "uncategorized" transaction pops up many days later I know it's a duplicate without having to do much more investigation.

    I've been pained by certain scenarios, like when the transaction auto-categorizes into "restaurants" and then I change it to "fast food". But then the duplicate pops up later as "restaurants" again. It's easy to miss it.

  • TheHikingViking
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    @Coach Natalie can you please clarify what you mean for this item?

    "A screenshot of your account register in Quicken Simplifi where the example duplicate transactions reside showing that they are a duplicate of another entry."

    Does this mean you want the original transaction(s) and their respective duplicate transaction(s) both to appear next to one another in the same screenshot?

  • Coach Natalie
    Coach Natalie Administrator, Moderator admin
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    @TheHikingViking, absolutely!

    When viewing the register for the account that has duplicate transactions, you should be able to see both duplicate transactions on the same screen. They don't necessarily have to be right next to each other, but since the Transaction Detail view will most likely be exactly the same for each example, we just want to be able to show our engineering team that there are duplicates in your register. If you're unable to obtain this piece of data due to the transactions not being captured in one screen, no biggie, we can leave it out. 🙂

    -Coach Natalie

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