Thank you all for giving us your feedback and voicing your concerns! Bank Sync is a huge feature set, and we’re listening and distilling all of the feedback we’re getting — the feedback we’re getting from you here on this thread and from those who are not.
It sounds like most of you folks are pretty proactive budgeters. Which is great! You’re exactly the budgeter that Goodbudget has been designed for thus far. You enter your transactions relatively close to point-of-sale so that your Envelope and Account balances are as up-to-date as possible. You like to schedule your transactions to help make things a little more hands-off. Etc.
As such, you want a syncing feature that helps you catch transactions that might have fallen through the cracks, or helps you reconcile your balances at the end of the month.
While that totally makes sense, that’s not what we designed Bank Sync for. We intentionally designed Bank Sync for folks for whom manually entering transactions is a barrier to budgeting.
Because we know this is a shift from what we’ve been providing so far, we decided that we’d keep the existing Plus plan available for those of you who want to continue manually entering transactions, and doing side-by-side matching with the existing import process, and then offer Bank Sync on its own plan level for folks who want to sync all of their data.
To back up a little, when we first considered Bank Sync, we imagined that there would be matching capabilities. In fact, our first rounds of Alpha testing included a version of Bank Sync that had some matching capabilities.
One of the learnings we took away from Alpha testing was that the matching features we had developed so far were not actually serving customers the way they needed and in fact, created more problems than they solved. We would have needed to spend a lot more time working out the issues with those matching features before they would be good enough to release.
When we moved to Beta and Gamma testing, we learned that Bank Sync without matching capabilities was serving customers well — they told us that Bank Sync was meeting their needs. So we decided to ship Bank Sync without matching functionality, because the people who wouldn’t be able to budget without Bank Sync were actually able to get their budgets going.
Now that’s not to say we’re going to leave Bank Sync as is and never make enhancements or fixes. We certainly will, and we’ll talk more about that below. But we hope that clarifies why we decided to move forward with rolling out Bank Sync without matching functionality.
We know that this might be disappointing to some of you, but we’re continuing to prioritize making Bank Sync work better for folks who are not primarily manually entering their transactions. And we want to be clear so that you can make an informed decision about whether or not Bank Sync is going to work for you.
- If you’d like to continue manually entering transactions and doing side-by-side matching with the existing import process, then Plus is your best bet. If so, we’re happy to switch you back – just shoot us an email.
- If you’d like to use Bank Sync and are fine with not manually entering data or deleting duplicates, then Premium is the way to go.
If you’d like to see what we have planned for the near future, check out this blog post. There, you’ll see what we plan to work on in the coming months, what we plan to work on after that, and some items that we don’t plan to get to anytime soon (or ever).