Buxfer: Blog

Smarter duplicate detection, better summary reports

May 8th, 2008 by Shashank

A couple behind-the-scenes changes:

Better duplicate detection: Our duplicate detection system is now much smarter. If you report transactions manually (e.g., from your mobile phones) and then sync your bank account, we will correctly identify the duplicates — even when the dates don’t match exactly! There’s also a “Find duplicates” link for those who want to inspect their accounts to search for old duplicates.
This detection extends to our account transfer identification rules as well. If you mark a transaction as a transfer from account A to account B, we will go looking for a possible duplicate transaction in account B, and get rid of it automatically.
Better summary reports: We have significantly enhanced our daily and weekly email reports to provide you with more in-depth and relevant information about your Buxfer account. Daily reports now provide a summary of your debts with your friends. Weekly reports provide you with a summary of your account balances as well.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 3:21 am and is filed under Bank accounts, Reports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Helder Says:
May 8th, 2008 at 7:23 am

Cool stuff! I was just getting started with the whole bank statement thing and was beginning to wonder if I’d have to dedupe things myself. Thanks for thinking ahead of me :)

Stan Says:
May 8th, 2008 at 8:09 am

Ashwin,
Thanks for the dup’s fix! What a wonderful improvement to an awesome software suite!

Pax,
- Stan

Charles Says:
May 8th, 2008 at 11:22 pm

So where *is* this “find duplicates” link? A quick search of the UI doesn’t find it.

Ashwin Says:
May 8th, 2008 at 11:25 pm

Charles: you can see this link when you visit the details of the account. Let me know if you have any further questions.

Dave Says:
May 9th, 2008 at 1:25 pm

This came in handy when I sync’d up yesterday and Buxfer added 27 duplicate transactions…

Ashwin Says:
May 9th, 2008 at 1:31 pm

Dave: yah, it’s ironic. Our system had a small bug which had that unintended side-effect. We have fixed that, so you should no longer see any more dupes after you get rid of these.

Paulo Says:
May 14th, 2008 at 12:19 am

Thank you for making this service even more useful with constant updates. I particularly liked the automatic rules for tagging transactions as transfers. It will make my experience here a lot more pleasant. Keeping things updated on Buxfer is now almost effortless.

One thing worries me about the new smart duplicate deletion feature. Can I disable it if I want to? Is it always going to ask me before deleting transactions it thinks are duplicates? I did a “Find duplicates” to see what would come up and it spotted several old transactions that had the same dollar amount and that had very close dates, but which were not duplicates. I wouldn’t like to have it decide what is a duplicate and what is not completely automatically. Also if it does delete them without warning, can I later check them and revert them?

Thanks!
Paulo

Chimerico (Jerry) Says:
June 25th, 2008 at 8:58 pm

I agree with Paulo. Is there any way to clear the list of old transactions that show up under “Find Duplicates”. All the ones that show up are older transactions with the same dollar amounts and close dates, but are not duplicates. I have 51 that come up, and I need to clear the list so when there are actual new duplicates, I will notice them.