I Lost 3 Months of Expense Data Because My Budget App's Bank Sync Broke

This actually happened to me. The sync between my budget app and one of my bank accounts stopped working silently - no error notification, nothing. I only noticed about three months later when I looked at my annual summary and the numbers seemed way off.

Went back and checked. The account had been disconnected since early January. Everything from January through March just wasn't there. I could have reconstructed it from bank statements but I didn't. Too much work. I just moved on with incomplete data for the whole year.

The annoying thing is I'd checked the app during those months. I just didn't notice one account's data was missing because I have a few connected and the dashboard still showed stuff. The missing bank happened to be the one I use less for day-to-day stuff so I didn't catch it.

Bank sync breaking silently is apparently a common problem - I saw a bunch of complaints about this when I went looking. Banks change their APIs or security requirements, the aggregator doesn't keep up, your connection just quietly dies. Some apps send a notification when reconnection is needed. Others don't.

After that I switched to DrakeAI mostly because the idea of important data being quietly missing again was bothering me. Manual entry is more annoying but at least I know what's in there. If I logged it, it's there. There's no sync that can break.

The tradeoff is obvious - manual means you have to actually log things. I miss transactions sometimes when I'm moving fast. So my data isn't perfect either, just in a different way. But at least it doesn't go missing in chunks without me knowing.