Clearbooks, Plaid or Co-op Business - who is at fault when bank feed fails to work?

Problem reported by Rachel George 1 month ago

Having changed my business account a few months ago to the Co-op and chosen Clearbooks as my MTD software, I was initially really pleased by how the bank feed seemed to work.

In the past 2 weeks, and since having to reauthorise the feed, am having huge problems to the degree that I now need to import all transactions (both income) and expenses manually. I will either miss the deadline or have to take a day off and lose income to do so. The Clearbooks advisor blames the Co-op as “buggy”. I phoned the Co-op, and unsurprisingly they say it’s not them, all working fine at their end. I’m aware there’s a 3rd party in the middle, Plaid. Who is to blame, how can I fix it, do I need to chuck the Co-op or indeed Clearbooks? What will actually work?? I can’t go through this stress every 3 months.

Also what’s with the “solved” box below? It’s not solved!

Solved
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5 Replies

Hi Rachel,

Yes, I have checked all those and can confirm they are working.

Tommy

1 month ago

Hi just to clarify are feeds for all of the following working : Virgin, RBS, Mettle, Monzo, NatWest (apart from issue you mentioned), Starling? All banks I’m considering moving to.

1 month ago

Hi Rachel,

No problem, I can confirm all the major UK banks are working well. There is a recent outstanding issue with Natwest where they don't seem to include the reference in the transaction description and there are intermittent issues with a handful of Lloyds users.

Tommy

1 month ago

Thank you for the explanation, Tommy.

Can you recommend a few banks whose feed is working well? If I was to change bank again I would want one that works well. I went to the Co-op because they are free and ethical, so would be looking for a similar business - I really don't want to change banks again, but I would like a working feed!

1 month ago

Hi Rachel,

Unfortunately, there are two outstanding issues that were escalated to Co-op several months ago; namely, the duplicate of transactions, and missing transactions.

They have acknowledged the root cause and are actively working on a fix. Worth noting that fixes like this are rarely straightforward: if transactions have been behaving one way for a long time, aligning them with the correct behaviour tends to have a lot of side effects and requires significant testing on their end.

This issue appears to affect all Co-operative Bank customers rather than being specific to a software. The same issue was reported by a Sage user. For reference to older posts: https://secure.clearbooks.co.uk/community/problems/28228/duplicate-transactions-from-bank-account-feed

Tommy

1 month ago

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