[Bug]: Tesco Credit Card (UK) sync issue

[mbrijun]

Verified issue does not already exist?

• I have searched and found no existing issue

What happened?

In the last 3 months I have observed 2 occasions on which bank sync produced incorrect results. The account in question is a credit card from Tesco Bank in the United Kingdom.

• On the first occasion, the account balance in Actual Budget (AB) was different from the balance on the Tesco CC app. After some manual effort I was able to trace it back to a transaction that was present in AB but was not on the bank statement. The fix was to remove the suspicious transaction and to re-sync again.
• On the second occasion, it was showing 2 transactions from the same shop (a pharmacy) a few days apart (on 16 and 19 December). In reality, I visited the pharmacy on 16 and 24 December. Again, I fixed the issue by deleting the erroneous transaction and re-syncing. At this point the second transaction appeared correctly on 24 December.

This leaves me with 2 questions:

• How does Tesco Bank CC sync handle "abandoned" transactions that the seller did not claim?
• Why did the presence of a transaction on 19 December prevent the creation of a correct transaction on 24 December?

What error did you receive?

No error messages were displayed. The issue was detected by manually verifying the synchronised transactions.

Where are you hosting Actual?

Locally via Yarn

What browsers are you seeing the problem on?

Firefox

Operating System

Windows 11

[MatissJanis]

How does Tesco Bank CC sync handle "abandoned" transactions that the seller did not claim?

I would venture a guess that the transaction was existing in your ledger at some point in an "uncleared" state and later Tesco deleted the transaction. The workaround there would be to create a custom bank adapter for this bank and make it ignore uncleared transactions. More on that here: https://github.com/actualbudget/actual-server/blob/master/src/app-gocardless/README.md

Why did the presence of a transaction on 19 December prevent the creation of a correct transaction on 24 December?

This one sounds strange, but I'm sure there is a reasonable explanation.

Either way - I will direct you to the community discord for further support about bank-sync issues. In this case it is not a bug, so will close this issue.

[mbrijun]

@MatissJanis - thank you for your comments on this issue. I agree with you that the "uncleared" transactions are the likely source of inconsistencies. Given that "uncleared" transactions are very common across all banks, do you think it would make sense considering either a global, or a per-account switch, indicating whether "uncleared" transactions should be ignored?

[MatissJanis]

I think that would be a good feature to have. Feel free to send a PR and I'll gladly review it. Or open a feature request issue in the main "actual" repository.

[mbrijun]

As much as it pains me to admit it, I lack the coding skills necessary to implement this feature myself. I have therefore opened a feature request.