TL;DR: If you see a transaction added twice in MoneyCoach and one of them has the orange Pending transaction badge, just delete it and you will be fine.
First off I want to say that this is an article for users who have connected their bank accounts to MoneyCoach.
Now that we've cleared that, let's get started. So you have connected to your online account and after the import, you might see some transactions that have a Pending Transaction badge in the app.
Generally these pending transactions are yet to be confirmed by the bank. MoneyCoach gets that information from the bank and imports it to your app labeling it as a Pending transaction. So far so good.
Now I will simplify how the process works, so you can understand it better, but what actually happens is a lot more complex.
In a couple of days that pending transaction will be confirmed by the bank. When that happens, most of the banks, on the backend, will send a notification that this pending transaction is now confirmed. MoneyCoach will receive that notification and in the next bank sync cycle, that pending transaction that is inside the app, will get deleted and the new confirmed transaction will be imported. This works automatically and you don't have to do anything.
However, some banks do not send that notification, meaning that MoneyCoach has no idea that this pending transaction is now confirmed. When this happens, on the next bank sync, MoneyCoach will basically import the new confirmed transaction along with other transactions, but it will do nothing to that pending transaction cause it doesn't know that the confirmed one and pending one are supposed to be the same transaction. So if you see a duplicate of the same transaction, you need to manually delete it as we can't do it for you.
Confusing, right? Well, you have no idea how much more confusing it gets on the backend as it seems that banks, even though they seem to be compliant with the PSD2 directive on paper, they are most definitely not. Throw into the mix GoCardless, our API provider, which by the way has it's own weird quirks, that works as a bridge between MoneyCoach and the banks... good luck figuring out what happens, what data gets imported, what accounts get shared etc.
Why am I telling you this? Well, it is cause we have received reports from some users that some of their online transactions have been "duplicated" and hearing that word is kinda scary for us. When in fact, if this "issue" happens with pending transactions, can easily be fixed by just deleting the pending transaction. Can we do some technical mumbo jumbo black magic sort of thing so MoneyCoach can try to detect and mix and match transactions and assume that they are the same and delete the pending one? Sure, we can with enough effort, but we've done that in the past where we've assumed things and took actions based on those assumptions and the results were not great. So we are not doing that thing anymore.
What's even worse is that banks, one time they will send the notification confirming a pending transaction and the next time they just won't. Same bank, different behaviour and the worst part is that we have no control over that. There are like 2000+ banks out there and each day we get reports from you, our users, about all sorts of weird things happening with bank accounts and more often than not, it is something that we can't do anything about. You wouldn't believe how many bugs, quirks and edge cases we've already accounted for in MoneyCoach behind the scenes so that connecting to your bank accounts is as smooth as possible.
To close, if you see a transaction added twice in MoneyCoach and one of them has the Pending transaction badge, just delete it and you will be fine.
