Hi,
We are using the API to import bank transactions on a daily basis into one of our internal systems.
Generally speaking, everything works perfectly. However, we get an intermittent issue where transactions are not imported for the previous day. We then have to manually trigger an import for the missing transactions.
Our process is as follows:
- Every day at 8:50am, we refresh the bank account using the API
- If the revised data indicates that the last activity date was yesterday, we then import the transactions for the previous day (by specifying the start and end date as yesterday)
This works 99% of the time, but every now an then, the data is not imported for the previous day.
Queries:
I was wondering if anyone has had any issues in relation to this and could point me in the right direction. Could it be related to the time of day I am running the import? We are based in the UK and I wondered if we could be calling the API to early (e.g. last days data is not ready yet as there was a transaction that was later during the previous day which is missed)
Thanks
Chris
Hi Chris,
I’m one of the engineers from the Banking Integrations team here at FreeAgent. We look after bank feeds, transaction imports and the API endpoints that you mentioned.
Could it be related to the time of day I am running the import? We are based in the UK and I wondered if we could be calling the API to early (e.g. last days data is not ready yet as there was a transaction that was later during the previous day which is missed)
This could be the issue. We aim to have all FreeAgent accounts up-to-date with the latest transactions from your bank by 9am each day, but occasionally it takes us slightly longer. This is usually due to us receiving more transactions than normal, such as the day immediately after a bank holiday, or banks performing maintenance on their systems, which delays our ability to start importing transactions from your bank in to FreeAgent.
If you were to delay your call to our API by around a hour, its more likely that we’ll have your latest transactions ready.
Alternatively, and depending on your exact needs, you are welcome to call our API more than once per day (maybe once at 8:50am, as you currently do, and then once again later on in the day) and import any transactions that you have not already imported in to your internal system.
If delaying your import doesn’t work, or you’ve got any more questions, please let me know.
If you’ve got any specific transactions that you know were delayed from your 8:50am import, feel free to send me the URLs of these transactions in a direct message and I can take a look at our logs to see why they weren’t included in your initial call to our API.
Kinds regards,
Brad
Hi Brad,
Thanks so much for the response. I will try delaying the imports by an hour and report back the results either way. It may take a week or so due to the intermittent nature of the problem and to be confident it is resolved.
If I do get any further failures after this I will PM you the transaction URLs.
Have a great day and again thanks.
Chris
Hi,
Just to let you know this has resolved the issue. Delaying the imports until 10am GMT is the way to go.
Many thanks for your help
Chris