Is Yodlee broken or do I not understand something here?
February 5, 2010 3:47 PM   Subscribe

Accountingfilter. Am I misunderstanding how this works, or is this a bug in the way Yodlee does manual accounting?

I'm managing my money using Yodlee. Yes I know there are other sites, this is the one I'm using. Most of my stuff gets imported automatically but I have one small local bank account that I had to enter manually.

I set it up sort of backwards, so I did one initial deposit instead of entering a starting balance. I can't go back an enter a starting balance without some bizarre "adjustment" entry so I did it this way. What you see in this image is the entire set of transactions [yeah, I deleted the leading number]. There are no transactions prior to or after the ones on this list. There is one pending rent transaction for March. The rent payment is set up to be a monthly transaction. Here is where I get confused.

- all transactions have "cleared" That is, I checked the "cleared" box and they show as cleared on this list.
- I tried switching the initial deposit to 1/1/10 in case this was some calendar year thing, the result is the same.
- The "overall transaction total" matches the dollar amount on my bank account [$4,174.59] but the running balance does not. Why not? Shouldn't they be the same?
- The running balance is exactly two rent payments too high.

I have a ticket into Yodlee support, but I figured maybe there's something I'm missing here that would explain why the running balance doesn't match my account balance. I'm smart with numbers but don't do much accounting so maybe there's some sort of standard obvious thing that is not obvious to me. Is this a bug or am I confused?

I'm not too concerned about being anonymous, just didn't want this linked to my main account. Thanks!
posted by anonymous to Work & Money (7 answers total)
 
Disclaimer: I don't realy know how Yodlee works.

The thing you need to notice is that "running balance" there. After the first item, that adjustment to create your starting balance, the running balance is *already* too high.

So there's nothing wrong with your transactions, they're all accurate, but somehow Yodlee's system thinks you started out with $1434 before your adjusting entry got put in.

The easy hack for this would be to alter your starting adjusting entry to be $1434 less than it is, but yes, I think this is something wrong with how they do things or their setup process, not with the way you understand how your transactions work.
posted by larkspur at 4:46 PM on February 5, 2010


It sounds like you may have screwed something up when you set the account up, and that hosed the whole process. If those few transactions are all you have, why not nuke the account and start over, being extra careful this time?
posted by chrisamiller at 5:14 PM on February 5, 2010


This is why I stopped using Yodlee. I could never make manual transactions work.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 8:55 PM on February 5, 2010


You're going to need some sort of adjustment in that account. The money can't have come from nowhere, it must be a change to something like capital or similar. That's why we usually make these sorts of changes as we are creating the accounts to begin with. It's worth your time reading up on adjusting entries before you continue because it's likely you're going to need them sooner or later (e.g. if you need to record a cheque issued but unpresented).

Looking for a double value in your accounts is a good way of finding an error, because somewhere in your operating accounts there should be a debit and a credit incorrectly recorded (in other words, the balance of one account will have double the missing entry in it).

Clearing the accounts is a cosmetic thing.
posted by Sutekh at 9:04 PM on February 5, 2010


Thanks folks - this is my question - seems like there is both a problem with Yodlee [there are no more transactions to edit than the ones that are listed, there is no way I can get at the data to fix this] and something I screwed up at some point. I think when I set up a recurring rent transaction and then changed the date on it, it created "shadow" rent transactions that are affecting the running balance but not accessible by me, the end user. I took chrissamiller's advice and set it up again and the weird anomaly has gone away. Thanks for looking at it for me.
posted by jessamyn at 9:24 AM on February 6, 2010


Hello Yodlee Users,

Thanks for providing us the valuable feedback.

The issues reported in this thread will come up in 904 version (latest version currently in Beta mode) for those Manual Accounts which were added prior to 904 product release and where users were not manually updating the current balance after posting a cleared transaction.

Let me try to explain this with the help of some user scenarios:

Scenarios Description:
Scenario A:
I am maintaining a manual bank account in 903 version. I do post manual transactions into my account but I never update my Current balance manually. This will lead to a mismatch between the transaction total and the current balance till 903.
Now in 904 (new beta version), when I post a new transaction into this manual account, Yodlee will recalculate the current balance by adding this transaction amount into the old current balance (new feature). This calculated amount will be used as the new current & running balance of the account.
Result: Current balance calculated is incorrect. Transaction total is correct.

Scenario B:
I am maintaining a manual bank account in 903 version. I never post manual transactions into my account but I do update my Current balance manually. This will again lead to a mismatch between the transaction total and current balance till 903.
Now in 904, when I post a new transaction into this manual account, Yodlee will recalculate the current balance by adding this transaction amount into the old current balance. This calculated amount will be used as the new current & running balance of the account.
Result: Current balance calculated is correct. Transaction total is incorrect.

Scenario C:
I adds a new manual account in 904 version (latest Yodlee beta version). Everything will be calculated and displayed correctly including Transaction Total, Current & Running Balance.

In nutshell, this problem is something similar to classic chicken and egg problem. It's very difficult for us to decide which one out of Current Balance and transactions total we should consider authentic when these two are not matching for the old manual accounts.
User Set A: Used to log transactions religiously, but forgot to update the current balance
User Set B: Were too lazy to report individual transactions or unable to recall transactions but make it a point to manually update current balance.

Since, there was no clear logic to fix this accounting problem automatically, we have somewhat left it up to the User to clean up the historical data.

These are some of the possible work-arounds to fix these inconsistencies:
1) Since currently in Moneycenter Users can access the old 903 application as well as 904 Beta in integrated mode, User can go to 903 application and fix the manual account by either posting the missing transactions or updating the current balance if it is not in sync with the transactions total. After doing this exercise, manual account experience will be smooth in 904 beta. User won't experience any accounting gaps.
2) Or Post a "Fix It' dummy transaction in 904 beta to offset the difference between transaction total and current balance.

Or do you want us to run a script to fix these inconsistencies as per our best judgement?

Btw, if you guys are not aware we have an official Yodlee Forum http://forum.yodlee.com for posting queries and to get in touch with Yodlee team. You can also expect a faster response over there.

Thanks again for using Yodlee products and for providing your valuable feedback. We are always open for consumer feedback and are very serious in taking those findings back to improve the quality of our products.

Thanks & Regards,
Ashish Agrawal
Senior Business Analyst, Yodlee PFM
Member of Yodlee Product Management Team
posted by agrawalashish at 1:40 AM on February 11, 2010


Thanks for the follow-up, I admit I'm still a little confused [I don't know why I would want to "update my current balance" if the transactions should just do that automatically but I think I understand your scenarios] but it looks like this is a problem that is on its way to being solved systematically. And I did contact Yodlee support about this issue and I never heard back from them in a substantive way. I got an email saying "Yodlee needs additional information from you" but when I went to the website I just had an email that basically explained briefly what you are saying above. That I have to both add transactions and update the current balance which is sort of antithetical to how I understood the product to work. Thanks again.
posted by jessamyn at 9:33 AM on February 11, 2010


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