Meld normalizes the data you receive from service providers. While you can always see the raw service provider response both in the serviceProviderDetails object of each endpoint when getting data as well as from the Activity Log, Meld does several things to normalize the data you receive.

Balance Signage

Balance signage should generally positive for all account types. This includes loan, mortgage, and credit accounts, where positive balances indicate the amount of money a user owes.

Transaction Signage

Service providers use different signage for deposite vs withdrawals. Meld standardizes the signage to the following:

Positive -- Positive signage means that money has moved out of the account. Transactions with positive signage include withdrawal and debit.
Negative -- Negative signage means that money has moved into of the account. Transactions with negative signage include deposits.

Investment Types

For both investments and investment holdings, Meld normalizes the investment type in the response.

For investment holdings, the Meld types are STOCK, MUTUALFUND, CASH, OTHER, REALESTATE, ETF, DERIVATIVE, and DIGITALASSET.
For investment transactions, the Meld types are SELL, BUY, CANCEL, CASH, OTHER, and TRANSFER.

Transaction Status

Transactions will have one of the following statuses:

Pending -- All transactions start as PENDING. A pending transaction is a payment, deposit, or purchase that has been approved but not yet fully processed.
Posted -- PENDING transactions will move to POSTED within a few days. The typical time period for a transaction to move from pending to posted is one to five business days, with generally a two week maximum on rare occasion.
Expired -- On rare occasions, PENDING transactions get cancelled and therefore stop showing up in the service provider responses. When this occurs, the transaction becomes EXPIRED.

As a result, when updating account transaction data, a period of two weeks (fourteen days) is recommended in order to capture transaction changes. After two weeks, it is extremely rare for any information about a transaction to change.

Transaction Categories

While providers themselves group transactions into their own categories, Meld also normalizes transaction categories between providers. Here is the list of provider category mappings to Meld categories: