Bank Pending Transactions

echollis

Within the past year several banks have gone to listing Pending Transactions and the subsequent Balance. That balance does not match the Quicken balance after Cleared Transactions causing a problem with Reconciliation. None of my banks will send the Cleared Balance instead of Pending Balance so I'm asking the Quicken Community if anyone else has found a way around the problem.

studpup

I have this problem with several banks, they send some kind of "available balance", not the ledger balance quicken needs to reconcile. My solution is to log into the bank website over the weekend, control-c to copy the balance from the last posted transaction there, and press control-R to manually reconcile and control-v to paste, then click ending date "today". Only way I can reconcile so it works for me.

echollis

And you (we've) gone from an automated system of reconciling an account to manual. I think we've gone backward a few steps. I think one way to get around this problem is to pay bills through a bank that sends the balance after cleared transactions and I'm looking for it.

studpup

Well, many people say they want to see pending transactions immediately and have billpays reduce their available balance before they're processed (to avoid overdraft, etc, something quicken users probably don't depend on)  I remember bank ads on tv that you could check their website and watch transactions as they happen. 

In my experience, any bank that uses Direct Connect downloads more reliably and reconciles perfectly, see if your bank supports that and use "Improve connection" and hopefully it's free if they do (WF I know wants to charge so be careful there). Quicken used to have a list of which methods they support for each bank, but it appears to be a broken link right now, https://www.quicken.com/support/how-quicken-connects-your-bank

If you're so inclined, the C:\ProgramData\Quicken\Inet\Common\Localweb\Banklist\UNZIP\fidir.txt file lists every bank, and has WEB-CONNECT, EXP-WEB-CONNECT, and/or DIRECT next to each financial institution.

I wish I had a simpler answer.

echollis

It's all about the mismatch of what the bank says the balance is (Pending) and what Quicken says (Cleared). No amount of Direct Connect or Express Web Connect is going to make it any better. I agree that Direct Connect is the best if you can get it. Some banks (Ally) don't have it yet.

Chris_QPW

It always been wrong for the financial institutions to include pending transactions in the downloads.  Why?

Simple there isn't any system in Quicken remove a transaction and not every pending transaction is going to post.  Some are not even the right/final amount.

Add into that what is happening right now with USAA they are sending pending transactions (which aren't in the online balance BTW).  And then when they post they send them again with a different unique Id and sometimes changing some of the details like the memo.  Bottom line is sending pending transaction using the current system is error prone and "non standardized".  It is just asking for trouble.

echollis

Hear, hear. Now we need to find a bank, local or online that will send the cleared checks along with the resultant balance and we'll have what we want. Why banks went to Pending checks and the resultant balance I have no idea but it screwed the automatic reconcile feature of Quicken.

studpup

echollis said:

Hear, hear. Now we need to find a bank, local or online that will send the cleared checks along with the resultant balance and we'll have what we want. Why banks went to Pending checks and the resultant balance I have no idea but it screwed the automatic reconcile feature of Quicken.

We could make a list of problematic banks. I only have one. EWC downloads would combine any transactions under a dollar, and they send the "available" balance. So I log in to their website and download qfx periodically and that works fine. They use Jack Henry as their back end provider.