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I need to keep in sync with transactions on accounts for a set of items. To me that means: 1. Do an initial download of all historical transactions. 2. Get new transactions when available. 3. Make sure no transactions are dropped on the floor.

It's not clear from the documentation and the API how this can be accomplished reliably.

The create API has a webhook parameter, so it seems I should have a webhook set up immediately on getting transactions. If I don't have I missed out on all the transactions forever?

Can I pull all transactions via the API alone? I noticed the options have an offset. Is that for a cursor? Can I ask for transactions way back and the past to trigger a redownload of transactions?

What if a webhook drops a batch of transactions? How can I tell? How can I redownload the missing transactions?

And I remember reading somewhere in the doc the account IDs and transaction IDs are associated with an ACCESS_TOKEN. Does this mean that the account IDs and transaction IDs can't be used to identify data uniquely across tokens?

dmulter
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Todd Hoff
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Plaid states that they can fetch transaction data up to past two years. However, the amount of historic transactions provided by banks vary from bank to bank. I’ve seen some banks provide data for the past three months, whereas some return data for last two years. I’ve also seen some banks not support returning any transaction data.

As for the webhook, please note that the amount of time it takes to retrieve historic data after connecting an account varies. That’s where a webhook is useful as you can be notified when data is available for fetching.

Plaid returns only 500 transactions per call (I think). So, you are responsible for pagination while retrieving historic data.

You can always retrieve historic data, but you will only be able to get the past two years maximum. Every day that passes, you will not be able to retrieve data for the first day two years ago. It’s a moving window. I’ve generally cached data on our side as you will not be able to access data older than two years.

If I recall correctly, each institution that is connected has a unique access token. You can use account id to uniquely identify transactions, but you might have to store the relations in your database as the returned data doesn’t have that.

Hope that helps.

Nick
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    When you say "cached data," you mean dropping it in a database? – Mark McKelvy Aug 02 '18 at 23:40
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    @MarkMcKelvy - Yes, that's what I meant. Thank for clarifying. I used a combination of Mongo, S3 and ElasticSearch. Mongo for storing records for day to day stuff. S3 for a complete backup. And, ElasticSearch for analytics. – Nick Aug 03 '18 at 00:00