Diary of an Emacs tragic

Category: 90 Percent of Everything is Crap

  • Xero’s Paypal feed is crap

    I’ve been setting up a new paypal account and I thought it would be nice to get the feed of transactions directly into Xero. Unfortunately Xero’s PayPal feed doesn’t understand how PayPal initially puts your transactions on hold until your account is fully verified. This leads to having your transactions incorrectly imported twice (with incorrect values) into Xero.
    I showed the error to Xero and after quite a bit of nagging them to follow it up, giving them futher evidence of the error whey they tried to deny it they eventually came back with a solution of “just manually delete the extra transactions”. This defeates the entire purpose of the feed. Well done Xero! *slow clap*
    Here is their support response for your viewing pleasure:

    Hi Jason
    It appears that PayPal are putting a hold on these transactions when they occur and releasing the funds to your account at a later date.
    What this means is that the feed is correctly importing the Gross amount and Fee amount at the correct date and when the net amount has been released to your account later in the month by PayPal, the feed is picking this up as a new transaction.
    We’d suggest deleting the incorrect Net amounts that have imported. Please let us know if you have any further questions.
    Xero Help Centre: Delete a Bank Statement Line
    Kind regards
    Michael

    One of the major selling points of Xero is their feed integration, but if they can’t even get PayPal right, what’s the point?

  • BPay View feedback

    Dear CommBank,
    While I think NetBank is great, the BPayView part seriously lets it down. I tweeted my feelings about this and you asked for feedback, so here it is:
    1. It silently lets the biller prevent you from viewing older bills. eg. I cannot view Sydney Water bills older than 6 months. but you don’t know this until you try to view the bill, you seen the “This bill is unable to be opened at this time.” and then you call tech support and they inform you that Sydney Water prevents bills older than 6 months from being viewed.
    2. It auto archives bills after 18 months. This should be at least 2 years if not 7 in my opinion
    3. if you open a bill and try to save the PDF, the PDF is not named something sensible so you can quickly save it and move on to the next bill, making saving bills a tiresome slow process.
    4. There should be an option to email the bills to you as a PDF as and when they become available.
    5. The archived bills view is useless a it does not show the date of the bill or anything useful about the bill except the amount. This is maddeningly annoying.
    6. You cannot open archived bills. well this wouldn’t be such a problem if points 2,4 and 5 were taken care of.