The bank feed from Starling is fundamentally broken. If there are two transactions of the same size on the same day from the same supplier, QuickFile only records one of them.
Yesterday I bought two books from Amazon for £9.99 each, and today I have just one £9.99 transaction registered in QuickFile. On checking, I find that the balance shown for the account in QF is £120 and change higher than reality, and looking back, every time there have been two transactions on the same day for the same amount from the same supplier, only one is recorded.
As with all feeds and imports, all transactions are checked for duplicate is based on 3 parts:
Date
Description
Value
If all 3 match, the transaction is skipped because it’s believed to be a duplicate, which sounds like is the case here. I don’t believe Starling provides a reference with the notification, only a supplier name, which makes it a bit trickier. If you have two transactions with different references, these would be entered just as the supplier name.
I will certainly feed this back to our development team however.
With NatWest they probably provided a transaction reference too. With a card transaction on Starling, they don’t.
As I mentioned, I will raise this with our team to see if there’s a way of pulling this information from Starling, but it does depend on the data Starling actually gives us.
Can I suggest a simpler solution? Duplicate transactions are much easier to spot and deal with than silently dropped transactions. Please add a configuration option so the user can specify what to do with them.
Even better, present a dialogue for each duplicate, allowing the user to accept or drop it.
Having now had to do a full line-by-line reconciliation, I find that there were nine missing transactions. Four of these were duplicates, but a further five were not, they were unique transactions and had just been missed from the bank feed.
This is going to be a right royal pain, because Starling do not, as far as I can tell, provide monthly statements, so reconciliation is a bit messy.
Certainly sounds a bit strange for transactions to be missing. If you would like to send me a private message with the details of this, I’ll ask our team to take a look into this for you.
Regarding the statements, Starling do provide these. If you open the app, go to Account Management > Account Information, you should see a statement option there. This should allow you to download either a CSV or PDF copy.
Ah, OK. Very odd place to have them, thanks for the pointer.
I’ll happily send you a PM when I’m back at my PC tomorrow. What information do you require? If you take a look at my Starling account entries it should be fairly obvious which ones I entered by hand today.
