Don't like transaction name truncation

[mike_feinstein]

Sometimes Mint cuts the name of the transaction (the vendor name) too short. For example, the restaurant Bamboo was shortened to Bambo. Other transactions have much longer names that make it through. This should be more consistent, and, in general, more information should make it through.

Another example is a restaurant called Noodle Street that was shortened to Noodle. Or, Lowell Showcase Cinemas shortened to just Lowell.

[Damon]

I will mention the issue. Does recategorizing the transaction/renaming the merchant work?

[mlebarron]

Yeah this does seem a little over agressive sometimes. I had "Dry Cleaning By Dorothy" shortened to "Dry Cleaning By"

[mlebarron]

The further I get into the auto renaming of the merchants, the worse it is.

Items I've seen so far:
Simons Auto Repair being names Simons Auto in one place, and then something completely different somewhere else (although I can't remember what now, sorry)
ATM withdrawal being just named "Boylston Street" and categorized as "Parking" (despite having ATM right in the merchant name)
Sweet Lemons 2 being renamed to Lemont Eric and categorized as Legal (it's really a restaurant)
Big Skinny Corp (makes wallets) being named "Big 5 Sporting" and going under Sporting Goods
Finance Charge Paid being named "Charles River Financial"

I have to go back through now and check every single transaction because I have no idea what some of them are. I'm not sure what the algorithm is for auto naming items, but at the moment it's hindering more than helping (at least for me)

[hannah]

Sometimes Mint cuts the name of the transaction (the vendor name) too short. For example, the restaurant Bamboo was shortened to Bambo. Other transactions have much longer names that make it through. This should be more consistent, and, in general, more information should make it through.

Another example is a restaurant called Noodle Street that was shortened to Noodle. Or, Lowell Showcase Cinemas shortened to just Lowell.


I must second this concern. The automated truncation/whathaveyou really screws things up - I have a transaction listed as Lincoln: Auto Payment. If you look at the original description: Checkcard transaction Lincoln Town Centre Cinemas, MyCity, State. Mymint automatically rewrote the transaction.

Sorry, but WTF?

More examples:
All Hydroponics: Garden & Outdoors = Apple.com
Adventure Online: Electronics & software = Online banking transfer Check to Save

Amongst many others. Please consider just setting a default blank category and no automated name changes (I know it's purely for aesthetics - but it's too buggy now) for all transactions upon import. It's easier to add categorization if you choose as you go than it is to go back and fix these ridiculous names/categories!

Thanks guys!

[mlebarron]

Adventure Online: Electronics & software = Online banking transfer Check to Save

That COULD be right... since I've had quite the adventure with some of the banks trying to do a proper online transfer ;)

[sparklerawk]

I don't know about you guys, but personally I like having my In N Out meals be categorized as Financial & Investment. :D

[Damon]

Please remember that we're still very much in a beta phase & will definitely try to iron these issues out.

Note: As this information is being passed to us by Yodlee, it might be a more complex fix than it would appear. But I will see what we can do!

[mlebarron]

Of course! Maybe if there was a way to turn it off though, as some people don't want them all auto renamed... I also noticed that my original setup had them all renamed, but then today when I updated, it left them as raw data. Not sure why.

Wouldn't Yodlee just be passing you the raw data though? It seems as though in some instances when I go to rename something, part of it is highlighted like that's they keyword mint used to rename the transaction. That keyword search just seems to be too simple (like apple.com being gardening).

Although, In N Out getting Financial Investment is a good one :)

[Damon]

I also wanted to add that the issue could be on our end as well, not on Yodlee's (don't want to pass blame).

For example: Some customers (B of A) are getting ATM withdrawals that show as something other than ATM. Are these B of A atms, or are they other ATM machines?

[mlebarron]

I have Bank of America... as far as I know, every ATM I've used by Bank of America comes through at least with "ATM" in the name. Not sure about others.

I can check my account history and let you know my experience, even if limited.

[Damon]

Thanks. Please do let me know about any weirdness.

[sparklerawk]

I did have one ATM transaction (made with my BoA card) that was categorized as coffee shop. But in all fairness the transaction was named Mocha City Coffee ATM Withdraw (it was an ATM at a local coffee shop).

[sparklerawk]

When I use ING's billpay it calls the transaction "Bill Payment to NAME OF COMPANY." Mint takes that transaction and just names it "Bill," assuming that they're all the same, and assigns it the Utilities category.

My thought is that Mint should somehow know that "bill payment" is more categorical and look for another part of the transaction name to determine what the most appropriate name (and thus sub-category, since we already know that it's a bill payment) should be.

[mintlover]

Why not offer an option to manually import statements from your account. This would bypass any limitation imposed by Yodlee.

[mlebarron]

Why not offer an option to manually import statements from your account. This would bypass any limitation imposed by Yodlee.

You're getting the same data either way, so it shouldn't really matter. It's a problem in the auto rename algorithm, instead of the data being received.

[Damon]

Interesting idea (I like it).

[Tau]

The truncation is creating a few more problems for me. Safeway is both a grocery store and fuel station here.

My bank passes "Point Of Sale Withdrawal# - SAFEWAY FUEL" and "Point Of Sale Withdrawal# - SAFEWAY STORE". These are both condensed to Safeway and categorized as groceries. My grocery bill is high enough without our petrol added into the mix, tyvm. ;)

[hpbrad]

I like the solution of having it being a feature that one can enable/disable... i'd much rather have my (sometimes) convoluted transaction name come over from my bank than a completely wrong truncated version that looks pretty... i understand that this feature will be awesome once polished, but in the meantime a simple on/off switch would work well...
I already use Yodlee and don't have a problem dealing with the long names (i'm used to them anyway)... i would say disable this feature by default until someone WANTS to turn it back on (or until it's a little more polished)

[rasheed]

I think someone out there thought that smaller names rather than the whole transaction name would be easier to understand -- this is not true. I can't possibly see why the name needs to be truncated -- it isn't that long anyway (what is provided by the banks/cards via Yodlee).

I'll give you some examples of weird name conversions:

Loanservicing - On Demand (actually a GMAC Mortgage payment) is showing as: Applied Business Software. I can't fix this.

Wash Mutual (Wamu loan payment) shows up as Wash. Not useful.

This goes back to the other point, one of the major reasons is the patent pending accuracy of transactions (95%) -- it is less than 50% for me and 95% of all my purchases are done at large or very large retailers. I am bummed by the amount of time I will have to spend re-categorizing the past history of transactions.

Rasheed

[Damon]

This issue will be getting better going forward (I promise). We're working on making this as accurate as humanly possible. I can only recommend renaming and recategorizing for now:(

[rasheed]

Your apply is appreciated. I know it will get better -- what I am really saying is that I feel mint.com is making it a lot harder for itself by changing the name of the transaction rather than useful to the user for that truncated name.

Rasheed

[Damon]

Understood. I just wanted to let you folks know that this issue will get better a little bit down the road.

[willje]

Understood. I just wanted to let you folks know that this issue will get better a little bit down the road.

Is there any timeframe on when this issue will be resolved? Some of my transactions with my bank contain the text "POS Pur. [Date]" and then the merchant name, but the Mint transaction loader is just putting "Pur" as the Merchant name in the transaction. It's not a huge deal, because I can cross-reference the transaction and manually change the name, but it does affect a majority of my transactions.

Also, just wanted to say that I think this application will be very useful for me and it looks like it has a great deal of potential.

[Damon]

No set date yet. I will let you know in "Mint Announcements" if I get a clearer picture about an improvement in this area.

[ahecht]

Here's another one: Mint seems to strip out anything following a hyphen. This means that Wal-Mart becomes just "Wal".

[GrinningCat]

It likes to split on ampersands, too. My cellphone bill came in truncated to "T Mobility", which baffled me for a bit (didn't I leave T-mobile long ago?) until I moused over and saw the full name was "AT & T Mobility". Yay for rename rules, I guess. :D

[Damon]

Something I've mentioned, that's for sure. I think some folks get freaked out & think they've been hit with credit card/bank fraud.

[ahecht]

Another problem that has come up is Pending charges on my Sovereign Bank account. Mint removes the word "Pending", and one the pending charge is replaced by a real charge on my statement, Mint doesn't remove the pending charge. As a result, I end up with two identical transactions, and it looks like I got charged twice. I have to click rename to find out which one was the pending charge and categorize it as "exclude from mint".

[Damon]

The duplicate issue should be getting better around the 22nd of this month.

[bunkers]

I know that yodlee doesn't do this truncation.

Personally, I could see how many mint was trying to simplify things ... but the truncation is wrong as often as it is right.

Its bad news (name truncation) and sounds like it will be changed.

[webmouse]

Frequently, the original name is an address - which is a pain, but I've learned to recognize the places that I frequent. Unfortunately, there is more than on place I shop on my local main roads and the way Mint is truncating them, it's impossible to tell them apart. A restaurant, a gas station, and a drug store with different addresses on Hall Road all get truncated to "Hall". This makes it impossible to even use the naming rules - I can't simply tell it to rename all "Hall" to "CVS" because they aren't all the same store.

This is a deal breaker for me using this fantastic site. I hope there is a fix very soon.

[Damon]

Definitely something I've been mentioning in my feedback reports.

[killalt]

As mentioned by everyone above the name truncation and sometimes laughable guesses about categorization are a big problem, but I don't actually mind going over my transactions to iron things out.

That said, when the system guesses wrong and assumes that a transaction is the same as one you've already got I get into a feedback loop I can't seem to escape. For instance:

My mortgage is from B of A.
My Car payment is from Fifth Third.
For some reason the system decided that the Fifth Third payment was BofA. So when I go to change the name I can do it for individual entries, but if I choose to create a rule my only option is to 'always rename BofA as Fifth Third' but of course that would change ALL my Bof A to Fifth Third and I only want to catch the ones that are erroneous. But since the system always truncates Fifth Third to BofA the problem never gets resolved.

I hope that's clear enough to engender a fix.:)

[missj5]

I pay almost all of my bills via direct deposit or withdrawal and the truncation issue kills any chance of Mint categorizing these entries properly. I log into my account and see a long list of transactions named "Ach W D." Clicking "rename" shows that these are all very different transactions, some from the electric company, others from Verizon or Sprint, mortgage, etc. Auto name change feature is useless in this situation as others have mentioned. So, not only do I have to categorize them, but I have to rename them all, creating duplicate work.

Having to manually rename & categorize all of these transactions makes mint about as useful as Microsoft Money.

I loved mint when I first started using it a few months ago, and while there are other small bugs or quirks in the program, this is BY FAR the issue that makes me use mint less and less often.

I hope it can be resolved very soon.

Thanks,
Jami

[Damon]

FYI...I shared your frustration with Product and Engineering...I would assume some changes to this in the near future.

[Damon]

Hi Folks,

We're going to do some more investigative work to improve the transaction renaming and categorization process. In order to do so, I need help from our community in making this better & invite people to contact us (https://wwws.mint.com/contact.event) with these issues. Please file under: Bug Transactions.

Here's what we need:
1. email address of your account
2. the date of the transaction.
3. the category/name that we assigned to the transaction.
4. what the original name of the transaction was (you can get this by hovering your mouse over the transaction).
5. If categorization, we will also need what the category *should* have been.
6. The name of the bank/url of bank (just for tracking purposes)

We will also be doing the same for no category transactions, such as when the transaction name is simply a series of numbers that came across from your bank.

[AcceptNoDuplicates]

I was just getting ready to get started on Mint when I found that it has this very same bug that caused me to walk out on my Mvelopes annual contract.

From Wells Fargo Bank I received truncated descriptions to MVelopes triggering duplicate entries there.

Like might be happening here, if you delete the truncated ones, you get duplicates of non-truncated. And if you delete the non-truncated, you get the truncated in duplicate. And the duplicates pile up until the service is not relevant or usable.

Fortunately it does not happen to everyone. Unfortunately, it can strike randomly after months of being a happy customer. You can find angry former customers with this bug on epinions (http://www.epinions.com/msg/sec_~forums/show_~threads/cat_id_~24/id_~7648/forum_id_~160/pp_~1#posts):

Unlike those guys, you seem to be proactive, and unlike them, I am sure you'd be happy to reimburse me for what I spend on Mint (Free!).

Here's what else you might ask for:

> Browser and platform
> How much browser cache is being used. (I don't know how to tell.)
> Similarities across several users who send you information.

Also investigate a less than perfect workaround for having end users target and delete the duplicates if you cannot prevent them.

For now, please write an article honestly telling the users what may happen and what they can do to recover, status on a fix, etc. State what browsers work best if there is a trend, and we'll change immediately.

That would place you far ahead of the competition.


Hi Folks,

We're going to do some more investigative work to improve the transaction renaming and categorization process. In order to do so, I need help from our community in making this better & invite people to contact us (https://wwws.mint.com/contact.event) with these issues. Please file under: Bug Transactions.

Here's what we need:
1. email address of your account
2. the date of the transaction.
3. the category/name that we assigned to the transaction.
4. what the original name of the transaction was (you can get this by hovering your mouse over the transaction).
5. If categorization, we will also need what the category *should* have been.
6. The name of the bank/url of bank (just for tracking purposes)

We will also be doing the same for no category transactions, such as when the transaction name is simply a series of numbers that came across from your bank.

[tamaracks]

Are there any plans to allow the user more control over their renaming rules? It's so frustrating when you can see that the data that would allow you to create a useful rename rule is in the original transaction, but because Mint cut it out, you can't use it.

For instance, Bank of America lets me transfer money to other customers of the bank. The name of the customer is in the transaction, but Mint removes it when doing the auto-name. I will send you the requested information about one such transaction through the contact form.

But really, it seems like two things are needed. 1, access to the full original transaction name when creating rules. 2, access to view and edit rules that have been created, rather than have them disappear into some black box.

[Damon]

Absolutely something we're working on & soliciting feedback on (1 and 2).

[agt]

As suggested I sent the following in as a Bug Report. Are any solutions in the works for my situation?


My bank reports POS/debit transactions using the merchant's street address, not the merchant's name.

So although the following two transactions are for two separate merchants, Mint shortens the merchant name to "MIRA MESA BLVD".

WITHDRAW# - POS 0504 0953 999999 8290 MIRA MESA BLVD. SAN DIEGO

WITHDRAW# - POS 0423 1532 333333 9051 MIRA MESA BLVD SAN DIEGO CA CA

Potential solutions:

1) Give us the ability to edit our established transaction renaming rules so that, for example, they could match on "8290 MIRA MESA" instead of "MIRA MESA".

2) Allow users to set SEARCH/REPLACE rules which would take effect before any other transaction name processing.

3) Implement artificial intelligence so that the street numbers in the transaction description are recognized as such :-) :-)

[firmcb]

how can I add gmacmortgage.com to my investments - for some reason, I can login under GMACbank. Thanks