Duplicate transactions in accounts with a bank feed

Bank feeds occasionally experience issues that may result in duplicate transactions with an account.

This can occur when the online banking website format changes unexpectedly and requires the feed to be updated accordingly.

Overview

For the most part, PocketSmith can detect and handle duplicate transactions provided to us by our data providers. When PocketSmith detects duplicates, it will merge the two transactions to show the most accurate information, including retaining any categorizations, labels, or other notes entered in PocketSmith.

Occasionally, our system is not able to detect duplicates. Most often, this is because the duplicated transactions have different dates (this usually affects pending transactions) or different merchant names (these are often updated after the pending transaction becomes posted).

What to do if you find duplicate transactions

Duplicate transactions are recent, and there are many

If you notice any recent duplicate transactions being brought in by the feed, please get in touch via the Help menu within PocketSmith so that we can investigate this for you.

Select Feed help and follow the steps for duplicate transactions.

To begin an investigation of any duplicate transaction issues, we need:

• a screenshot or a transaction export file from your online banking website for the relevant period
• and some examples of the affected transactions in PocketSmith

Duplicate transactions older than 90 days

If you discover duplicate transactions over 90 days old and no recent instances of duplicates, then it's safe to delete these. Firstly, it's best to compare your transactions within PocketSmith to your online banking to confirm whether they are authentic duplicates before deleting a transaction.

You can learn how to delete a transaction here: Deleting one or more transactions.

Using the find duplicates tool 🔧

When they occur, most users notice duplicate transactions during their regular use of PocketSmith. However, you can also use the Find duplicates tool to identify potential duplicate transactions.

You can then compare the highlighted transactions to your online banking to confirm whether they are authentic duplicates (rather than two transactions of the same amount that happened to occur at the same merchant on the same day).

The Find duplicates tool is located in the toolbar on the Transactions page.