Bank America no longer downloads pending transactions

ronholl1

This is due to the new connection as I went back to direct connect for a while and the pending transactions were downloaded. Unfortunately, it seems I can no longer use direct connect.

I called support and they seemed aware of issues with Bank of America, but it would be nice to know if this is something they can address at some point. When downloading transactions, it has always downloaded pending transactions from the Bank's Bill Pay service. I now am tracking those manually in Quicken, which is not at all great.  Thanks much!

Quicken Jasmine

Hello @ronholl1,

Thank you for reaching out to the Quicken Community. 

With the new EWC+ connection method (which will show as "Quicken Connect" in Quicken for Mac), scheduled bill pay transactions will no longer download as they did before as this was a Direct Connect feature. The new connection method only downloads posted transactions.

I apologize for any inconvenience.

ronholl1

So, the pending transactions will never come down anymore? I was hoping it was something that might be addressed. Have to say, I love the improvements to Quicken Mac over the last few years but this is not an improvement.

I appreciate the response as I won't be looking for that to be fixed but it was such a nice feature to have and it does kind of stink to lose functionality with a product like this, don't you think?

jacobs

Quicken Jasmine said:

The new connection method only downloads posted transactions.

@""Quicken Jasmine" Yet Quicken Windows recently debuted a feature specifically for downloading and showing pending transactions. (It's currently on hold because there were issues with it when it was released.) Are you saying that the plan is for Quicken Mac to not offer this functionality which Quicken Windows will offer? Thanks.

Chris_QPW

There seems to be some confusion here over "pending transactions" and schedule bill payments.  They aren't the same thing.

With Direct Connect/bill pay through the financial institution if you scheduled a bill payment either in Quicken or at the financial institution's bill payment system, Quicken would put in/sync that bill information as a future transaction with the bill status associated with it.  This is only possible with Direct Connect because it has the commands in it to do the syncing between Quicken and the financial institution's bill payment system through the OFX protocol.  Quicken Connect's protocols do not have these commands and as such can't do this.

You might think of these as "pending transactions", but they aren't.  If you schedule a payment 2 weeks from now, it will show in Quicken and on the financial institution's bill payment system, but in fact no transaction has been actually performed until the payment is actually sent.

"Real" pending transactions are the transaction that the financial institution has already got, but not yet fully processed.  Think credit card payments, or deposits where you they show up on the financial institution's site as pending but have yet to affect your current balance.

These are the pending transactions that the new feature in Quicken Windows was downloading until they reverse putting them in because they were causing problems like certain balance amounts being wrong.

I also believe this was hitting Quicken Mac because I saw people on Mac threads report seeing downloaded pending transactions.  Note this is associated with Quicken Connect, not Direct Connect.

Chris_QPW

P.S. The fact that they turned on the new pending transactions feature just as Chase and Bank of America were getting rid of Direct Connect and therefore bill pay through it makes for a lot of people confused as to what is what.

jacobs

@Chris_QPW Thank you for your clear explanation of the difference between scheduled bill payments and pending transactions. But my follow-up question to @Quicken Jasmine was intended to clarify whether the intent is that Quicken Windows (when the pending transaction feature is reinstated) and Quicken Mac are intended to operate differently going forward with respect to pending transactions. (If financial institutions are downloading pending transactions and balances which include those pending transactions, I'm trying to understand how Quicken Mac will ignore the pending transactions yet reconcile to the pending balance.)

Chris_QPW

@jacobs, I doubt you are going to get an explanation because I think the reason they backed the change out is because they didn't have a good handle on how this should work in the first place.

It is again one of these features where on the surface it seems simple, but the implementation is in fact very complex, and maybe even impossible.

It seems like a simple request.  "I want to see the pending transactions".
To me that roughly translates to "I want to see the same information that I would on my financial institution's website.".

The problem here is that not all financial institutions display the information the same way and also, they might have access to data that isn't sent to Quicken.

In the implementation that showed up on Quicken Windows you could turn off the pending transactions.
That immediately implies that they have access to both the online balance with and without the pending transactions.  From the problems that surfaced, that doesn't seem to be the case.  That would absolutely be needed to do reconciling to them, but even reconciling to pending transactions doesn't make sense.  Those transactions might be temporary and never be entered into the register.  Reconciling should always be to non-pending transactions.

I didn't really play with the Quicken Windows implementation, but from the comments the pending transactions in the register were sort of handled like it does with showing reminders in the register, in that they aren't normal transactions that you can edit and such.

Past the "not fully understanding", there were clearly quite a few implementation bugs because of not realizing where all these different balances show up in Quicken.

jacobs

Chris, it seems to me it's not a simple as bugs in the implementation in Quicken Windows.

In order for this to work in the first place, at least some financial institutions are clearly including pending transactions in the QFX transaction stream they output. This suggests that there is language in the OFX lexicon to label a transaction as pending, to edit the amount and date, to delete it, and to change it from pending to posted, right?

Quicken already deals with lots of transactions which are downloaded that it ignores: transactions which match the FITID number of a previously-downloaded transaction in Quicken's database are duplicates, and Quicken ignores them. Without a pending transaction feature, Quicken would also see — and delete/ignore — transactions tagged as pending. For a pending transaction feature to work, I would think Quicken would need to see if a downloaded transaction with a duplicate FITID is tagged pending, and if so, not reject it as a duplicate if the syntax of the transaction is to edit or delete it, or to change it to posted status. That seems a little complicated, but do-able. 

And my question was centered around whether and how Quicken Windows and Quicken Mac are handling pending transactions. If Quicken Mac is not going to have the pending transaction functionality as Quicken Windows, does it simply delete/ignore all downloaded transactions which are tagged pending? That would keep the register in proper order, but it would mean reconciling to an online balance doesn't work. That's the problem a lot of Mac users were running into in the past month or two. Or… are they retaining the pending transactions internally, and using them to adjust between the online balance from the FI and the register balance in Quicken? Or… is there something in the OFX lexicon where FIs transmit both posted and pending balances?

Markcrow

Hello All. I am definitely missing the BOA downloads that used to include payments added to Bill Pay. Are we saying they will never be coming back? I really liked the pendings that seemed to work for about 5 days before I got the message that it was broken. ANy chance of return?

ronholl1

Markcrow, I get the impression this will not work again, not now, not ever. I don't like it at all as I need to log into BofA and enter any future Bill Pay transactions to track them. This is in no way an improvement for short time or long time users.

Love all the attention being paid to Mac Quicken but so disappointed by this failure to continue to deliver on their part.

Chris_QPW

@jacobs Sorry I just saw your posted today, so this is delayed.

First off let me state that the "pending transactions feature" that was put into Quicken Windows and then pulled shortly afterwards because all the problems, was only implemented for Express Web Connect and Express Web Connect +, not Direct Connect.  Which makes perfect sense since you would have to go to every financial institution and change what they send.  Note up until now it has always been the policy not to send pending transactions, but some financial institutions did even though they should have.  That was a bug on their part.

I assume that with the FDX protocol (and it has to be an assumption because they don't make the protocol public) has some way to mark the transactions pending and maybe give different online balances and such.  But that doesn't explain how they would get the information they need for this with Express Web Connect where how (what format) they download from the financial institution could vary quite a bit.  But even that might make sense since not all the financial institutions using Express Web Connect started sending pending transactions, only a few. So, maybe just certain Intuit could change what they fetched.

Now let me say that the OFX protocol has always allowed for sending pending transactions and marking them that way.  It also, has commands for reversing pending transactions that don't go through.  But Quicken has never implement this part of the protocol.  And that goes for the financial institutions that Quicken is supporting.

It is like the fact that the talk about the fact that FDX is more secure than Direct Connect/OFX and one of the main reasons is that usernames and passwords are no longer used, instead Intuit uses a OAuth2 rotating security token.  Well, the OFX standard has allowed for the same authorization system for several years, but neither Quicken Inc or the financial institutions implemented it.

Chris_QPW

ronholl1 said:

Markcrow, I get the impression this will not work again, not now, not ever. I don't like it at all as I need to log into BofA and enter any future Bill Pay transactions to track them. This is in no way an improvement for short time or long time users.

Love all the attention being paid to Mac Quicken but so disappointed by this failure to continue to deliver on their part.

You are correct the feature is never coming back for any financial institution that drops Direct Connect/OFX, the other protocols do not allow for syncing the bill payment information.

In truth this discussion has the wrong title:

Bank America no longer downloads pending transactions

Here is the proper definition of "pending transactions": The transactions that have reached the financial institution, but have yet to be cleared.

And the definition of "scheduled bill payments":  These are "transactions" that are in the financial institution's bill payment system, not in your financial institution's register.  The fact that Quicken shows these in its register is misleading.  They aren't really transactions at all, they are an instruction to the financial institution to send a bill payment.  That might have been today, or it might be in the future. This is no different than you are sending a check.  When you write a check put it in the mail and you enter the transaction into your register, but the financial institution knows nothing about it.

In fact, take the case that you are sending a payment to a biller that can't take an ACH transfer.  Your financial institution using their bill payment system is going to actually send a check, that check may never be cashed, just like one you might send in the mail.   You are basically putting a "future transaction" that you know/think is going to be cashed.

Chris_QPW

BTW the timing of putting in the pending transaction feature couldn't have been turned on at worse time.  It has caused all kinds of confusion of what people were talking about.