New in PocketSmith

Two hours downtime for scheduled maintenance and upgrades will occur at on Wednesday June 10 at 9 AM NZST / Tuesday June 9 at 5 PM EDT / 9 PM UTC. Back-end database upgrades are being performed to set up for the upcoming user interface release, and requires that application servers are taken offline. We expect the upgrades to take an estimated 2 hours.

Check Twitter for updates during the downtime at http://twitter.com/pocketsmith. Thanks for your patience!

Update: unfortunately things are taking longer than expected. Downtime has been extended by an hour, meaning we’ll be back at 8pm EDT / 12pm NZST. Apologies for the delay!

Lots of progress this week on the new user interface, many fixes and improvements! We’ve also updated the test database to be up-to-date with the main application as at 12am UTC / 12pm NZST today too, so you’ll have your latest data to use in the new UI over the weekend.

Access the test server at https://2015-ui.pocketsmith.com, and view the known issues at http://psmth.to/3I. Remember that live feeds won’t work, and changes made in the test environment will not reflect back onto the main application.

Mint import is now a bit more forgiving if a file has been opened in Excel. Categories with both income and expense portions will show their transactions and data correctly in the Budgets page; previously only one would correctly show. We’ve also made credit card processing error messages much more descriptive too, with the full error response message from the provider now being shown.

Our main website experienced some unexpected downtime on the 30th of May. This was due to a power failure at the datacenter of our website hosting provider. Once power was brought back to the facility, there were some extended server failures which led to the longer than expected delay in getting site back up.

The main application was not impacted by this, and could be used normally throughout the incident.

We’ve been making great progress building the new PocketSmith user interface, and we’d love for you to take a look! Head to https://2015-ui.pocketsmith.com to get started. Live data is in use, and is current as at the 5th of June. Changes made here will not reflect in the main application.

Please be aware that this is still work in progress, and caveats and known issues are listed here. This being said, we’d love to hear what you think - please use the “Feedback” item in the menu to let us know!

A bug in the live bank feed service has been fixed. If you’ve experienced reliability issues with performing feed actions in the past 10 days, these will now be resolved. Note that this won’t have an effect on error codes for feed connections - please get in touch if you’re getting an numbered error code.

News on the big upcoming user interface overhaul: we’ll be releasing a select number of features with the new UI early next week for pre-release testing. Stay tuned for more details!

Forecast data is now correctly extended via the Account Summary, if viewing data far into the future. Grouped account balances now show correctly in the calendar, and we’ve fixed an issue with the Net Worth page’s “updated at” date to correctly respect the timezone your account is in. We’ve also tweaked the behaviour of the “uncategorized” links, which will now open in the same window instead of a new tab, which improves this workflow.

When an OFX or QIF file is uploaded, you can now choose to combine each transaction’s “payee” with the “memo” field, to produce a unified merchant description. This is useful if a bank mixes up these fields. The new option is shown at the end of the file upload process.

Previously, a category could be set to be it’s own parent if it was edited through the bulk category form; this problem has been resolved. Also, bug fixes for validation of the advanced “repeat every” section of the budget form have also been released.

Now when you categorise transactions, your setting for the “Apply to… as a rule” checkbox is now remembered. This makes repeated rule creation quicker. Also, the “uncategorized” row is now hidden from the Income and Expense statement if there are no uncategorized transactions.

The “Uncategorized” row can now be hidden from the Cashflows page, as if it were a normal category on that page. Also, a bug fix was released for annual repeating budgets, which were previously slipping back a day when repeating over a leap year.

Quirks in actual balance display for net worth accounts have been fixed. The balance line graph was previously incorrect when the net worth account started after the graph. Also, historical actual net worth balances were stuck at zero when the calendar was in “Show actuals in history” mode.

We’ve updated the new fuzzy live feed search to be a bit smarter. Results with an exact match will now appear at the top of the list, with fuzzy results afterwards. This makes it quicker to find your institution. Big work continues in other areas, more updates soon!

Now when you categorise transactions from Bank Statements, your current search will be reloaded afterwards. So if you’re working through “uncategorised” transactions for example, the newly categorised transactions will disappear once processed, streamlining the process.

We’ve updated our Google login to a new authentication standard. Don’t worry, you’ll log in just like before—all changes are in the background to help set us up for the future. We’ll also now send you a confirmation email if you change your email address, so you’ll know you’ve entered it correctly and we can still get in touch.

Cashflows now features an “Uncategorized” row in each section, summing all transactions without a category. Searching for bank feeds is now fuzzy, meaning exact search terms aren’t needed to find an institution. We’ve also fixed the XLSX transaction export for Numbers for Mac, as previously some columns would not appear at all.

The Bulk Actions window now uses the same controls as everywhere else now, meaning you can now un-categorise transactions in bulk from here too. Also, updating a category now triggers required account reloading, resolving some oddities that could occur after editing a budget’s category.

Online shopping sites are now available as live feeds. These include previously discontinued sites: Gap.com, Banana Republic, Walmart and Amazon (UK).

Yodlee occasionally displays incorrect transaction dates, sometimes with future dates. This can cause recent transactions to not be found by PocketSmith. We’ve now fixed this, and incorrect future transaction dates will no longer affect finding recent bank feed transactions.

15:18 NZST - Errors are occurring on connection attempts between our live bank feed application and Yodlee. This is causing the live bank feed service in PocketSmith to work intermittently, with unexpected behaviour when attempting to add new credentials or perform a live feed update.

20:39 NZST - Yodlee have performed fixes on their end, and errors are no longer occurring. Everything appears to be normal, but we’ll continue monitoring.

We’ve upgraded the Calendar in preparation for the new UI. Most of the changes are under the hood, but you’ll notice a difference in the way balances are depicted.

Account forecast data will now be reloaded correctly when a category has a budget added, edited or removed from the Budgets page.

The pie graph on Bank Statements now respects the search dates entered into the main search form by default. So, a date entered into the search form will be immediately reflected in the graph.

Historical forecast and budget information is now being calculated when navigating backwards through the calendar, in “Show actuals in history” mode. Previously, calculations weren’t triggered properly when in this mode, meaning required data wasn’t available if “Show actuals” was turned off.