Transactions missing from bank account display/download

Support
1

Hi,

The display of transactions in one of our bank accounts (HSBC) appears to have become corrupted.

Transactions between 2/5/2017 and 5/7/2017 are missing and have been replaced by the following text dated 2/7/2017:
++++ nett of May 03 to Jul 02 transactions
with amount beside it of £1,714.10 (money out).

In addition, several subsequent transactions have corrupted text, although their dates and amounts are correct:
08/8/17 OOO Friends House ++++
10/8/17 OOO Friends House ++++
16/8/17 Use of funds publi ++++

All of the balances (including that in the 2/7/17 pseudo-transaction) are correct.

What I can see on screen is reproduced when I download the transactions into Excel.

Obviously I don’t know whether this is merely a display problem or something in the database, although the correct balances implies that the data can’t have disappeared altogether…?

Please could you look into it?

Thanks!

2

Hi @mfmorris

I’ll certainly ask our team to take a look for you on Monday.

Do you know how these transactions originated, e.g. Yodlee feed, Chrome plug in, manual entry, uploading of a CSV file, etc.?

3

All transactions were entered manually.

I think (but am not certain) that all transactions from 4 May onward were entered together in a single batch on 16 August or soon after. Some but not all of the entered transactions were tagged, probably in the same session.

(For further information, I’ve checked our other bank accounts and all seems fine. So it seems limited to this particular batch of entered data.)

My own guess is that there was a glitch in committing part of the data to the database after it had been entered…?

If that is the case (i.e. some of the transactions are missing), I can re-enter them - this is not much problem. I can also correct the text descriptions on the three August transactions that otherwise seem correct.

However before doing anything I would like to have the data looked at, and any partial data removed. In particular, any data sitting behind the “++++ nett of May 03 to Jul 02 transactions” entry - including particularly its effect on the balance in this and any other nominal accounts - would need to be cleared out so that it is possible to start from a clean sheet.

If you can do this without disturbing the bulk of the transactions from 5 July onwards (which look OK) it would be good, to save me a bit of work.

I feel this is probably a better approach than digging around to find the original data (if indeed it exists) and try to reinstate it. That would no doubt cause you more work than it would take me to put the data in again.

Hope this makes sense,

Mary

4

I can confirm that all these entries were made on 19th August. However it looks like you may have used unicode characters (perhaps Russian letters) and these were substituted with ‘+’ characters on entry.

At this time we only support standard ASCII characters. It is however possible to modify the references here by just putting your cursor on the line reference and over typing what is there or replacing the text entirely.

This item is untagged so it wouldn’t have any affect on other balances in the software.

5

Thank you for the quick response.

As regards unicode characters, this is interesting information but I wonder if it is relevant. I didn’t enter any Cyrillic characters, and all of the text was typed from scratch on my (English) laptop. I never knowingly work with non-ASCII characters except occasionally when entering special characters (Cyrillic, French accents etc) in Word documents.

I wonder instead whether the missing characters (which were lengthier text than what looks like a standard 4-character ‘++++’) became corrupted and are therefore no longer recognised as ASCII when the page is rendered…

The "++++ nett of May 03 to Jul 02 transactions” single entry that is displayed is a substitute for 15 transactions that were entered in the date range 04 May to 03 July. Some of these (perhaps most of them) would have been tagged at the time of entry.

Therefore, when you say “This item is untagged” I don’t know what to make of that statement…

What I need an assurance about is whether or not the fifteen “May 03 to Jul 02” transactions are still present in your database, and whether or not there are corresponding transactions in any other nominal accounts.

Under normal circumstances, if I wanted to delete a transaction I would first untag it, and then delete the entry. In the present case, I don’t know whether it would be safe for me to try to “untag” and delete this item because I don’t know whether

(a) this is a genuine single-line entry in the account (the 15 apparently corrupted transactions have already been deleted from (all nominal accounts of) the database, and your system has automatically replaced them with this single entry)
or
(b) the “++++ nett of May 03 to Jul 02 transactions” entry I am seeing is being constructed for display purposes when the page is rendered, and all of the 15 apparently corrupted transactions are still sitting there in the database (perhaps affecting multiple nominal accounts).

In other words, I don’t know whether what I am seeing corresponds to the actual content of the database.

I hope you will be able to clarify this for me. I’m also hoping that you will be able to clear any corrupted data out of the system (because you have access to the database are are better placed then me to do it). As already said, I am happy to re-enter the transactions once I know that I am starting with a clean sheet.

6

I’m not sure where the ‘++++’ came from. We’ve tried to replicate this our end but we’re unable to. Is it possible you have any extensions running in your browser that could have perhaps altered this?

But I can confirm that the data you’ve highlighted is as it is in the database and there are no records of it being changed. I’ll try and address some of the points in your post for you too:

We don’t have a log of the 15 transactions you refer to, being entered, only the ‘++++’ transaction for this date range.

What you would see when you access your bank statement view within your account is what is in our database for that particular bank account (specifically, that nominal code, 1202). The ++++ nett of May 03 to Jul 02 transactions is visible in both the database and your account bank statement view. It’s the entry itself that contains ‘++++’ rather than it being a display issue. Is it possible that it was copy and pasted into QuickFile and due to the encoding it’s been converted?

The transaction itself hasn’t been tagged to an invoice, transfer or anything for that matter - it’s just sat in the bank account.

We don’t automatically delete any data.

As mentioned above, the entry itself has been saved with the ‘++++’ which is why it’s being displayed like that.

7

Thank you very much for confirming all of that.

Exactly how this happened is obviously a mystery. The important thing is that you have relieved my mind of worries that there are “unseen” transactions hanging around in the database.

The absence of a log of the 15 transactions implies that, probably, this data was lost before it got into the database (or technically, before any database transactions were committed). The alternative, that not only the data but the logs were deleted subsequently, seems too much to believe.

A puzzling question is what piece of processing generated the string "++++ nett of May 03 to Jul 02 transactions” together with the associated amount (which is the net sum of the 15 bank transactions). I can assure you that I did not, myself, construct this entry so it must have resulted from some intermediate processing. Hard to imagine where it would have come from. (It sounds if anything like a line of text from a report. It’s almost as if a report were running that totalled up the net amount of those transactions, and then substituted that line into nominal account 1202 in place of the original transactions.)

Be that as it may, I assume that I should now be safe to delete the “nett of” entry and add back the original 15. I’ll plan to do this sometime from tomorrow evening, unless you want to do any further investigating first.

8

I can’t say where the ++++ nett of May 03 to Jul 02 transactions transaction came from unfortunately, but it does appear to have been inputted manually.

For reference, next to each transaction we put a little symbol to show how they were added:

Manual transactions show image
Automatic / imported transactions show image

If you put your mouse over this icon, it will also show you the date and time the transaction was added. So for example, the transaction in question on your account was created manually on 19/08/2017 21:28.

I can see you have at least 1 other active team member on your account, so it may be worth checking with them to see if they have done this.

It’s untagged and not locked, so the only effect it will have on your accounts is your bank balance. You can delete it if you wish. We don’t need to investigate this any further, so you’re welcome to amend it as you see fit.

Of course, if this does crop up again, please let us know at the earliest opportunity, and we’ll happily take a look for you.

9

Mathew,

It is a very sad indictment of your system that you are not in a position to say confidently “these transactions were entered by user x”.

The MediaWiki software (as used by Wikipedia) is not designed as an accounting system but it keeps a meticulous, some would say obsessive, record of every edit done to a page, be it just the addition of a comma.

10

@Roger_W_Haworth

Why would you assume we don’t know?

Our support staff don’t necessarily have access to detailed audit data, that doesn’t mean it’s absent, it just means we need to escalate it to get an answer.

As my colleague has mentioned we know 100% when the data was entered and exactly if and when any edits are made (in this case there were none). We also know which user was logged in at that point in time and even their IP address and browser details. This is not something we will disclose to the user on a public forum thread for obvious reasons.

11

Hi Glenn,

I understand completely why you would not disclose information of this kind in the public forum - and I am sure that we would not want you to do so.

I assume that if there were a need to escalate a support call, the conversation could be continued “offline” by email instead of in the forum thread…?

As your support staff have pointed out, we do have more than one person with access to our bookkeeping. I will double check with my colleague before responding further.

12

Hi Mary,

We have the information from the audit log so I will open a private message to discuss further.

Please look out for a green notification in the top right of the forum (give it 5 mins). This should allow you to view and respond to the private message.

13

Glenn,

At 17:04 you sent me a message [PM] with a link saying Visit Message to respond. But when I click on the link I am told “Sorry, you don’t have access to that topic!”. So why am I not allowed access??? I think it is about stuff that I have done.

14

I sent the message to the account Mary originally posted on. I think maybe this is linked to your email? Mary did respond to the message last night. I think Mary will be able to copy the details over to you or invite you to the conversation.

16

Glenn,

I want to thank you and your support staff for help with this matter.

It has now been confirmed, with your assistance, what was going on. It comes down to a lot of confusion (mostly mine) caused by unexpected data entry and internal communications failure. I’d like to say here that nothing unusual was going on with Quickfile processing and the perceived problems were entirely on our side.

Thanks again,
Mary

18

Thanks for confirming Mary, glad we could help.

19

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