Open banking - your transactions in untied
untied uses a way of bringing in transactions from your bank or building society account called Open Banking. It can also be used for some card accounts.
It's the same technology used by major accounting platforms.
Open banking is a standard that varies between banks
All major banks and building societies are required to offer this. But the amount of data they share can vary - some may offer 18 months of transactions, others 7 years. The way they share data can vary as well. We help it make sense to you.
We can do this directly, but normally go via an aggregator
We sometimes do this directly with banks. More commonly we use "aggregators" which are specialist companies that link to banks, and take steps to send the data to us in a consistent way. It costs us money to do this, but also saves us time. The main one we use is called Truelayer. We also have a relationship with Plaid.
Transactions don't come in immediately
When you first link your account, we'll bring in transactions as far back as possible. However, the technical architecture of the feeds that we get means we only have a short window to do that. If there is a glitch in the connection, we may not get all your transactions.
And even once you are connected, we don't get transactions immediately - they need to "clear" and be finalised before we can display them.
When you connect your bank, you need to select to link all the accounts you want to bring into untied from that bank in one go. Otherwise if you link one, and then come back to link another, it may end up disconnecting the first one.
You need to refresh your connections every 90 days
It's a regulatory requirement that you need to refresh your bank connections every 90 days. We'll send you a reminder!
What to do if your transactions aren't coming in
See this article - you may need to re-add your account (don't delete it first!).
How we try to help you get things right
We have controls in place to help you. But we can only show you the data we get from the banks, and if something isn't there we don't know it
Checks we would do in a company accounting system are harder for personal accounts.
And sometimes we don't get what you may expect.
Pots and pending transactions
Banks treat things differently - like pots or pending transactions. They have different ways of identifying transactions. And some banks give us running balances to help us keep on top of each transaction, while others don't (this means there's a greater chance of duplicates or missing transactions). They can also change references on transactions when they move systems.
Overall open banking is a good way to keep track of transactions. We and others work so that everyone is aware of the strengths and limitations of doing it this way - including HMRC. But you also need to keep an eye on things in case something significant is missing. If in doubt, get in touch and we can help you look into it.