Explain bank transactions in bulk

Feature Requests
#1

I have bank statements with 1000s of entries. As a result, I want to be able to programatically explain these transactions.

At the moment I have to make 1 API request for every single explanation, which when combined with the rate limits is just a painful experience.

It would be great to be able to provide an array of bank transaction explanations in one API request.

E.g.

POST https://api.freeagent.com/v2/bank_transaction_explanations

{"bank_transaction_explanations": [
  {
    "bank_transaction": "...",
    "category": "...",
    ...
  },
  {
    "bank_transaction": "...",
    "category": "...",
    ...
  },
  ...
]}
1 Like
#2

Good idea – this would be pretty useful to have.

#3

Hi Darryl and Andrew,

Thanks a lot for this suggestion, I can certainly see how this could be a
useful addition to our API. I’ll pass it on to our Product Manager for triage as a feature request.

With all the best wishes for the new year,

Ewa
FreeAgent Englineering Team

#4

We do automated bank transaction allocation in our app but we simply map the allocations in our own data and then have a process one by one push them into FreeAgent. Problem is with your approach that you might get errors per transaction, so FA would have to return a list of those which I haven’t seen done in the API anywhere. Everything tends to work on a single entity basis.

#5

Well, when you upload a bank statement you are uploading a list of bank transactions, any of which might be invalid. I think FreeAgent handles it in an all-or-nothing way, i.e. all of the transactions in the statement are created or none is. FreeAgent could take the same approach for lists of explanations. It would the client to handle a rejected list; perhaps fall back to uploading the lists’ explanations individually.

Update: I was wrong about the all-or-nothing:

Your data has been uploaded successfully. However, this does not indicate whether or not your statement has been imported correctly - please make another request to list your currently imported transactions

Source: Uploading a bank statement: Responses

Anyway, the wider point stands – that FreeAgent could take the same approach for lists of explanations as for bank statements.

1 Like
#6

Hey,

Just want to add my voice to this request.

I’ve built a bank feed between iZettle and freeagent (so I can allocate the individual sales on date they were made as opposed to the aggregate amount on the date the money was transferred to my bank).

Auto guessing explanations was not useful, as it would fill out the description with random previous descriptions, so I disabled that and opted instead to explain them automatically from the API.

Of course I could store my requests in a queue and implement backoffs and retries but this is just a one off project to make some business administration easier (I’m sure Andrew probably thought that at one point, right enough) - but anyway, I would prefer not to.

As far as guesswork about how this would be implemented goes, the private API already supports this feature with the bulk_explanations endpoint:

2021-03-05-110347_1650x624_scrot
2021-03-05-110347_1650x624_scrot1650×624 119 KB

Could we have it, pls? :slight_smile:

cheers.

M

#7

Hi Mark,

Excellent detective skills! :male_detective: We do have internal functionality which does something similar, however it currently relies on the explanations being of a roughly similar type, so it will require some tweaking before we could have a public API endpoint that allows you to pass in a free array of BankTransactionExplanations. In the meantime, I’ve added your vote to our feature request tracking system which we use to prioritise what will be worked on next, so thank you for expressing your interest in this functionality!

Best wishes,

Ewa