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Reverse decision to include pending transactions in downloads

splasher

The new process that includes pending transactions in the downloads is causing lots of issues.

The decision to implement this was a mistake and it needs to be rescinded.

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Status: Reviewed

Comments

Tom Young

Actually, I suppose I could see this as being useful for a very small number of Quicken users, users sophisticated enough to screen out the pending charges that they know will never see the light of day, or that will eventually actually post with numbers different than the pending figure, but most users are just going to be confused by it.

splasher

You go to a restaurant and pay with your credit card. The pending transaction is pre-tip and the cleared transaction is post tip. Can someone give me a good reason to want to muddy up the picture with a number is not correct when you will get the cleared amount a day or two later?
Gas stations are even worse, generally the pending transaction is for $1 which is not even in the same neighborhood as the eventual charge unless you are buying a quart of gas.

markus1957

This could be fixed without much effort by treating pending transactions as the temporary placeholders that they are. The pending transactions table for each account should be deleted at every OSU and only show the pending transactions downloaded from the FI during the last OSU session.

Quicken should also restore the global preference option so users that don't want the feature can turn it OFF globally rather than have to disable it in each account register.

Randall

The pending transactions feature has ruined Quicken in my opinion. Gas stations in my area put $125 to $175 holds on credit/debit cards. I enter transactions in advance and/or for the actual amount (dinner w/tip) and Quicken now doubles those transactions. Worse yet, since they implemented this feature my online balances are wholly incorrect, not matching the actual balance with cleared transactions OR the balance with pending transactions. I cannot even reconcile some of my accounts any longer. I hate the feature, and overall hate the product that Quicken has become. Having been a users since the early 2000's the likelihood of continued support and financial drain towards an declining product is fast approaching. Pending transactions are an unnecessary and USELESS feature.

Jim_Harman

It would certainly be helpful if Quicken provided a clear rationale or use case for new features like this.

It would be even better if they learned from their mistakes and reviewed the use cases with experienced users before implementing the new features. This would help ensure that new features meet real customer needs and do not have unintended consequences.

Richard Teitelman

I agree that downloading pending transactions is USELESS. Why? I only want to see cleared transactions in my register.

miklk

All new so called features should be OFF by default.

Chris_QPW

I was actually surprised by a couple things. One is that they at least temporarily turned the feature off, normally they figure it is better to "power through it" no matter what pain they cause the users. The second is how easily they turned it off. That suggests a level of remote control that I didn't think they had. Sure, it isn't much of a surprise that they could stop the downloading of pending transactions upstream, but the fact that also affected the hourglass icon in Quicken and the pending transactions already in the register did surprise me.

Anyways here is how I see the situation.

Some users tend to live in an uninformed dream world where they believe Quicken should work, the way they want/see on their financial institution no matter if the needed information is available to Quicken or not. So, they ask for a given feature and Quicken Inc tries to provide it even though it can't be accomplished 100% correctly instead of coming back the users and explaining why this can be done correctly. So, we end up with at best a feature that pleases no one.

Some examples of this. Transactions sorted in the exact some order at the financial institution. Transaction dates like what they see at their financial institution instead of the posting dates. I'm sure I'm forgetting some really big examples, but the ones I chose have the same theme as these.

First off, I'm believe that we are probably talking about 1 in 10 people that want the feature, and even out of the 1 in 10 there might be some variation, but I believe the goal is the same as the others I mentioned, they want Quicken to display/work like their financial institution's website.

This runs into problems quickly for a number of reasons.

Not all financial institutions handle pending transactions the same.
Not all of the information the financial institutions use to display their data is available to Quicken.
Quicken doesn't necessarily have all the same fields or treat the ones it has the same as the financial institutions.

I will also point out that one has to be careful about the current feedback on this subject, because lots of users lost the bill payment system along with the syncing of those bill payments and are now thinking they are "pending transactions" when they have nothing to do with each other.

Let me show you a "simple", "long standing" example of how something like this plays out.
Who here uses the "Credit Remaining" amount in Quicken?
Other than a ballpark figure the answer better be, no one.

Why, because for any person that uses it to decide how much they can spend and stay under their limit they are going to be in for a surprise because the number isn't always correct. And it has always been like this no matter how many times it has been pointed out to Quicken Inc and Intuit before them.

I believe they can get closer to the right amount, but probably can't be right is all cases because different financial institutions do, do it differently. Where this amount tends to go wrong is after the statement close and before the payment because of the way the financial institution handles returns opposed to how Quicken does in this period of time.

And note allowing pending transactions is going to complicate this even more.

In some ways I commend Quicken Inc for wanting to give the customers what they are asking for, but on the other hand their threshold for tolerating a feature that isn't 100% is far lower than mine.

Jim_Harman

Another recent example was the change to the order of same-date transactions in investing accounts.

Transactions for the same date had always been shown in the order entered, but for some reason, Quicken changed it to always sort alphabetically by Action then by security name. This forced Buys to appear ahead of Divs and Sells, creating a temporary negative cash balance.

It took a lot of user complaints to get them to change the default back and make the Action/security name sort an option.

deanmcilwrath

Did the "pending transaction" feature get disabled in the most recent update? I did see some downloaded transactions marked pending a few days ago, but don't see them now and I don't see an "hour glass" icon referred to above to enable/disable the feature.

Also, I am missing all transactions from multiple accounts for one day (4-Oct). I think it it is likely these were downloaded as "pending" transactions, and then perhaps they were deleted when the pending feature was disabled. Anyone else have a similar issue?

Jim_Harman

Quicken has disabled the downloading of pending transactions as they fix the issues it caused.

justme12

Pending transactions has been a problem since first introduced. After it was disabled, I am still getting pending transactions on several credit card accounts.

KennyGolub

I too am having a problem with this as I always have to allow it to make an adjustment to the register when I reconcile, then delete it after it clears entries. Do not like this part at all.

splasher

KennyGolub said:

I too am having a problem with this as I always have to allow it to make an adjustment to the register when I reconcile, then delete it after it clears entries. Do not like this part at all.

The easy way around that is to reconcile to the "paper" statement and NOT the online balance which may or may not include pending transactions depending on financial institution.

q_lurker

splasher said:

KennyGolub said:

I too am having a problem with this as I always have to allow it to make an adjustment to the register when I reconcile, then delete it after it clears entries. Do not like this part at all.

The easy way around that is to reconcile to the "paper" statement and NOT the online balance which may or may not include pending transactions depending on financial institution.

That “easy” way applies even if the paper statement you are reconciling to is not on paper, but rather is on-screen somewhere.

Chris_QPW

justme12 said:

Pending transactions has been a problem since first introduced. After it was disabled, I am still getting pending transactions on several credit card accounts.

One has to realize that the downloading of pending transactions before this feature was added/removed have been a long-standing problem that isn't really part of the same problem.

Even with Direct Connect there were some financial institutions sending pending transactions when they shouldn't that this applied doubly to Express Web Connect.

Now I don't know what magic Quicken Inc/Intuit did to turn on pending transactions for all the Express Web Connect/Express Web Connect + accounts for their new pending transactions feature, but clearly it was some other kind of process than the financial institutions/Intuit scripts doing the wrong thing and sending pending transactions when they shouldn't.

And to make things worse when we are talking about this subject there is always confusion because there are the ones that send pending transactions when they shouldn't (pretty rare) and then there are the ones that include pending transactions in the online balance when they shouldn't(not to uncommon especially lately). Note it this second problem that is much more prevalent, and it has been there for as long as Quicken has been downloading transactions.

I didn't really get any chance to play with the new pending transaction feature, but from what I have seen from the posts, the pending transactions behaved like reminders where you couldn't delete and such.

These clearly behaved completely different from the pending transactions that were being downloaded as regular transactions.

mrkp89

A problem I found with pending transactions today is they are read in as posted transactions in the Projected Balances but they cannot be matched to a Bill Reminder transaction. So if I enter a Bill reminder to my register and it is a duplicate of the pending transaction, I now have two duplicate transactions which causes the Projected Balances to be incorrect.

wenglish

Ugh, your comment prompted me to go look. They turned this feature back on! And they have NOT re-added the "Enable pending transactions when available" option under Edit > Preferences > Setup, which was one of the ways to disable it.

Instead I have to click the drop-down for the hourglass icon to the left of "Ending balance" and for EACH EWC+ account choose to "Hide pending transactions". Which results in a multi-second refresh of the GUI for each account.

Chris_QPW

It looks like they turned them off again. I'm not seeing this morning.

miklk

What's interesting is it looks like people that had Pending enabled prior to being shut off have it and people that had it turned off do not have it.

Since the option is missing from Edit/Preferences, there appears to be no way to toggle it on or off.

mrkp89

> @miklk said:
> What's interesting is it looks like people that had Pending enabled prior to being shut off have it and people that had it turned off do not have it.
>
> Since the option is missing from Edit/Preferences, there appears to be no way to toggle it on or off.

That is interesting and a bit sneaky. Had I known, I would have had it shut off before the updates.

UKR

mrkp89 said:

> @miklk said:
> What's interesting is it looks like people that had Pending enabled prior to being shut off have it and people that had it turned off do not have it.
>
> Since the option is missing from Edit/Preferences, there appears to be no way to toggle it on or off.

That is interesting and a bit sneaky. Had I known, I would have had it shut off before the updates.

As far as I can see on my R45.21, the option to turn this on or off is by account.

If/When enabled, there will be an hourglass icon next to the "Ending Balance" text at the bottom of the register. Click it to toggle pending transactions on or off.

The pending release of fixes for R46.XX may yet change that again ...

Rocket J Squirrel

UKR said:

As far as I can see on my R45.21, the option to turn this on or off is by account.

I can't find it anywhere in R46.9.

Chris_QPW

@UKR this what I see starting today.

The icons for turning pending transactions and such on and off was there yesterday.

mrzookie

I'm running 44.28. Icons were there this morning (1/7), but they're gone tonite. They need to keep it off until its really right.

wenglish

I've been on R45.21 for several days (certainly since before they recently re-enabled the "pending" feature).

On 1/6 or thereabouts the "pending" feature got turned back on, and now on 1/8 it is off again (meaning the hourglass icon to the left of "Ending balance" for each EWC+ account is gone again).

Clearly they are toggling this on the server side as I have not updated Quicken in quite a while.

I think they're running a "scream test"

DianeB

Long time Quicken user and banker, this "feature" is really not useful, almost rendering Quicken useless.

drillman826

I do not like the pending transactions being downloaded because I never balance

splasher

I hope you voted. @drillman826 @DianeB