Some terms that can be useful to know as you get used to PocketSmith’s feed system.
Feeds glossary
Accounts
Accounts in PocketSmith are repository’s of your financial data, and are a one-to-one representation of the bank accounts you are looking to track.
Authorising
Authorising is when you allow access to your bank accounts to PocketSmith, via one of our feeds. This will then give read only access to PocketSmith, in order to download new transactions and balance data.
Automatic Syncing
Feeds in PocketSmith sync automatically on a schedule, unless you have turned automatic syncing off, or if your feed requires input from you before syncing.
Balance
Balances are imported by your feed, and are often available in a few different configurations. PocketSmith imports your current balances, and then calculates the historical balances, using each transaction’s value in reverse, until the start of the account. You can find out more about balances here: Balance settings for an account.
Data Provider
Data Providers are third party aggregators, who provide feeds for many different financial institutions. Each Data Provider maintains the connections they have with financial institutions, and allow access to PocketSmith for importing user transaction and balance data.
Direct Connection
Direct Connections are feeds that connect directly to a financial institution, without going through an intermediary or third party. They are created in conjunction with the financial institution, and are our rarest feed type.
Feed
A feed is a connection to a financial institution, which allows automatic importing of users transaction and balance data. These are most often supplied by Data Providers.
Feed Accounts
These are the accounts that have been authorised and shared with PocketSmith, from your bank.
Feed History
This is the setting used to define the earliest date of transactions that will be imported when new feeds are added to your PocketSmith account.
Linking
Linking an account is when you connect or create an account in PocketSmith, that will match with one of your feed accounts - bank accounts that have been authorised on your feed. You can link a feed account to an existing offline account, or create brand new offline accounts to link during the process. Find out more here: Linking and unlinking a feed.
Linked Accounts
Linked accounts are accounts in PocketSmith that have been linked to your feed. These accounts are the repository in PocketSmith that stores the imported transaction and balance data. These are converted to offline accounts when they are unlinked.
Offline Accounts
These are any accounts in PocketSmith, that aren’t linked to a feed. Any accounts that are unlinked from a feed are automatically converted to offline accounts.
Pending Transactions
These are transactions that are marked as “pending,” or “on hold,” in your bank account. This usually indicates that these transactions haven’t been fully processed yet, and may change before it’s fully confirmed. Once they are confirmed with your bank, they are marked as “posted,” and will be updated in the linked account, the next time your feed syncs.
Provider Notice
These are notices or alerts that are created by our team, to provide extra information to users of specific feeds. These are most commonly used when an existing issue is affecting many of our users. We also use these notices to provide users with extra information they may need when authorising or troubleshooting issues.
Requires Input
This alert comes up when your bank requires extra security steps to be taken before your feed can be successfully authorised or synced. The frequency that this is required is set by the financial institution you have added the feed for, and can sometimes be required before every sync attempt.
Syncing
Syncing is the process that updates new transactions and current balance data, for any connected feeds that are working correctly. This can be performed manually, or left to run automatically, depending on the feed.