Register and bank balances never reconcile

Stealth007

I've used Quicken for several years and never had a problem reconciling my bank accounts. I would get the downloads of the checks that cleared, compared that with checks that haven't cleared yet and viola, the register and bank balances would balance and I'd be off doing something else. However, at some point, I began having trouble each month in reconciling my register to the 'bank balances'. I found the reason for that is the bank is now taking out the 'pending' transactions and lowering the online balance. So, I have to manually log in online to the bank account and check if the total of 'pending ' transactions, add that figure to the stated bank balance, and see if my register would balance.

Why doesn't Quicken download the 'pending' transactions to my register so I can balance that to compare with the online balance? (Of course, it would be and 'uncleared' item.

How can I make my life easier and find a way to balance my bank account?

UKR

Quicken is not supposed to download pending transactions until they have been confirmed as actual withdrawals / deposits. Pending transactions, especially in credit card accounts, may disappear after a day or two, to be replaced with actual purchase transaction.

When I write and print checks with Quicken, I always create a register transaction in Quicken when I write the check. This makes sure that my register balance is reduced by the as yet uncleared check, because that money is no longer available to me. I don't wait until the check is being downloaded from the bank to create a register transaction. The monthly manual reconciliation hardly ever causes a problem, either, because any uncleared transactions are not part of the Reconcile. I don't reconcile against the Online Balance. But that's just the way I run Quicken.