[Bug]: Re-Linking Bank Account (simpleFIN) to Actual Account not fetching transactions and producing error + report to Github dialogue

[R6snap]

Verified issue does not already exist?

• I have searched and found no existing issue
• I will be providing steps how to reproduce the bug (in most cases this will also mean uploading a demo budget file)

What happened?

A few of my accounts needed to be re-added in SimpleFIN. To re-link them in Actual, I removed the existing links, synced the server, then re-linked the accounts (both using the drop down within the account and also using the global add account > link. The account did not immediately show as linked. After a few moments, it eventually showed a green circle. When I attempted to refresh the transactions, errors began to pop up and it said to report the issue here.

(Docker container on Synology NAS)

actual-actual_server-1-2.html.zip

Where are you hosting Actual?

NAS

What browsers are you seeing the problem on?

Safari

Operating System

Mac OSX

[latetedemelon]

I'm having the same happen since the upgrade to 24.8.0. In fact, after (re)linking an account the account linking screen becomes blank afterwards. Upgrading to edge has the same symptoms.

[palermog]

I'm having the same issue where the account linking screen becomes blank.

[muammar]

I'm having the same issue where the account linking screen becomes blank.

Same here. It all was working perfectly fine before this last update.

[gittyup883]

Same issue. Kept getting "Failed syncing account" error messaged, so I reset SimpleFin token and tried unlinking and relinking accounts. But not can't relink as page is blank.

[latetedemelon]

Can you try callling the API manually? I suspect you’re running into rate limiting. (529 error).

…

________________________________ From: gittyup883 ***@***.***> Sent: Saturday, September 14, 2024 8:02:24 PM To: actualbudget/actual ***@***.***> Cc: Rob ***@***.***>; Comment ***@***.***> Subject: Re: [actualbudget/actual] [Bug]: Re-Linking Bank Account (simpleFIN) to Actual Account not fetching transactions and producing error + report to Github dialogue (Issue #3228) Same issue. Kept getting "Failed syncing account" error messaged, so I reset SimpleFin token and tried unlinking and relinking accounts. But not can't relink as page is blank. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub<#3228 (comment)>, or unsubscribe<https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ACDYM2NLPJIXWT6FY3ROIS3ZWT2EBAVCNFSM6AAAAABMJSSHBWVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMZDGNJRGMZDMMJRGU>. You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[Houndie]

I've also run into this error, and for me it does look like I've been rate limited.

╰─➤ curl $ACCESS_URL/accounts
{"errors":["Too many requests. SimpleFIN data is only refreshed once every 24 hours. Expected usage of this API is 24 requests per day."],"accounts":[]}%

Suggest at minimum making sure this error gets logged if it isn't already. The solution does seem pretty simple, wait until no longer rate limited. I'll wait a day or two and try again and report back.

[Houndie]

Great: I've waited a little over 24 hours, and while I still receive an error popup when syncing accounts, it does appear to still work, so rate limiting does seem to be the error reported by the poster.

That said: When I sync all accounts, the app appears to sync one account at a time. When reading the simplefin api, it appears that the accounts endpoint gives you financial data on all of your accounts. If Actual isn't already batching the syncs together when the user requests to sync multiple actual accounts simultaneously (such as when syncing "all accounts", which I would guess is a pretty common operation), it would probably be useful to do that to avoid this rate limit. If SimpleFIN Bridge doesn't want more than 24 requests in a 24 hour period, that's going to hurt users with more than 24 accounts to sync.

(That said, it's possible you do this already! This guess is based on how the app behaves, but I haven't read the code :-) )

[Houndie]

If I'm reading the code correctly, it does seem like we iterate over each account here and perform a sync on each one, which results in a large number of requests to the SimpleFIN bridge.

(It looks like gocardless is account specific so the same kind of optimization may not be helpful on that side)

[matt-fidd]

The groundwork for batching more efficiently was laid in actualbudget/actual-server#384, there's some dev work needing to be put in on the front end to make it functional though

[Masong19hippows]

I just came across this issue as well. Weirdly enough, it wasn't happening with 24.8.0. I upgraded to 24.9.0 to see if it would fix an unrelated issue, and now I can't edit the simplefin accounts - the screen when adding is just blank. I also can't downgrade because I get an error when accessing the file with a downgraded version that I need to update the client. Its actually pretty frustrating because I don't have most of my accounts setup properly yet, and so actualbudget is unusable for me at the moment.

What I don't understand is, how come I wasn't getting rate limited before the update? It doesn't seem like the api calls changed from one version to the next, so why is rate limiting suddenly a problem? Were the SimpleFin accounts cached or something, and so the client didn't know if it was getting rate limited or not, and this was changed?

Also, did anyone find a workaround?

[Houndie]

Workaround afaik is to make sure you're not making more than 24 requests in a day 🤷 .

The batching feature mentioned above should help significantly with staying below that limit.

[Masong19hippows]

@Houndie

I emailed simplefin support and they said this

The suggested use is 24 requests/day, you will get warned at 48 requests/day and then blocked at 96 requests/day.

This is pretty high honestly. At least with my setup, it would take 10 bulk syncs of my account when I hit this limit.

I did a bulk sync of my accounts and some of the items gave an "account missing" error. I think this is just the user facing error when the limit is reached

I think I figured it out though. Whenever you link an account with simplefin, it does a bulk update of all of the accounts once you exit the page with the list of accounts. When I was using it, I linked one of my accounts and then exited, then I went back in and linked another - trying to make sure everything was correct. Every time I left the simplefin account list page though, it bulk updated all of my linked accounts. I thinks this just added up and I hit the limit.