What happened to Pending Transactions?

tfhoughton

I am running R44.28. I used to see pending Transactions. I can no longer see them. No Hourglass.
What is the status of Pending Transactions?
Thanks!

Boatnmaniac

The Pending Transactions feature was turned on in Sep was turned off shortly afterward.  There were a number issues being reported, especially with regard to Account Register balances not matching Account Bar balances and Pending transactions not getting updated/matched nor being able to be deleted, but there were other issues as well.  So, it was turned off until the issues could be resolved.

No announcement has been made, yet, the status of this.  It would be nice to get an update but it's likely we won't see anything more about it until it is made available, again.

Boatnmaniac

BTW, here's a long thread dated from 9/30 when R44.20 was released and the Pending Transactions feature was turned on, through 10/7 when it was turned off with additional posts made through 10/19:  https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7920703/pending-transactions-x/p6.   It's a good discussion about the feature and the issues encountered.

Boatnmaniac

The Pending Transactions feature was turned on in Sep was turned off shortly afterward.  There were a number issues being reported, especially with regard to Account Register balances not matching Account Bar balances and Pending transactions not getting updated/matched nor being able to be deleted, but there were other issues as well.  So, it was turned off until the issues could be resolved.

No announcement has been made, yet, the status of this.  It would be nice to get an update but it's likely we won't see anything more about it until it is made available, again.

tfhoughton

Thanks! I agree. It would be nice to get a status update from Quicken.

lthomas844

for years I could download pending transactions from Bank of America. Now I cannot. What do you mean the feature was Turned On in September?

Boatnmaniac

lthomas844 said:

for years I could download pending transactions from Bank of America. Now I cannot. What do you mean the feature was Turned On in September?

Are you talking about having been able to download Pending Transactions or Scheduled Bill Pay Transactions? 

I know that payments scheduled via Direct Connect Bank Bill Pay would be downloaded at the time of scheduling and before they would actually be paid.  But with BofA discontinuing support for DC and replacing it with EWC+, that is no longer possible.

The Pending Transactions downloads is something that is different.  It is a feature that Quicken released in late Sep with R44.20 that allows financial institutions to download transactions they have received from other businesses (not sent from within Quicken) but have not yet been posted.  In the past this feature did not exist.  Because of the issues noted above, Quicken turned off this feature on their server and not with a new version release.

Boatnmaniac

BTW, here's a long thread dated from 9/30 when R44.20 was released and the Pending Transactions feature was turned on, through 10/7 when it was turned off with additional posts made through 10/19:  https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7920703/pending-transactions-x/p6.   It's a good discussion about the feature and the issues encountered.

Marty McGuire

My problem is simple. I schedule my credit card and other payments through my Bank of America checking account. My expectation, and former action in Windows Quicken, is that the transaction would be imported into my desktop Quicken application when I perform a One Step Update. However, the payment is now not shown in my desktop file until after the schedule pay date. I saw somewhere that this was due to Quicken change over to Express Web Connect and it affected all of my bank and credit card accounts. This is crazy. I use my desktop Quicken to ensure that my payments are made on time. and with them showing in Quicken, I have to log into my bank account to confirm payment date. When will this be update/repaired??? Help

Chris_QPW

@Marty McGuire that isn't the pending transactions feature, that is the bill payment feature that is tied to the Direct Connect protocol.  When a financial institution drops Direct Connect, that feature is also going to go away.  If you want to predict the future payment you need to now either also enter it into Quicken manually or with a reminder.

Marty McGuire

I do not use any of the Quicken payment or scheduling functions. I primarily use Quicken to track my investment and banking accounts. Previously, I was able to enter a payment into BOA for a credit card for a future date. When I performed my subsequent One Step Update, the transaction would appear in my BOA checking account transaction list. From your response, I can no longer download that future transaction. That is insane if you are saying that I have to duplicate my effort to manually enter a transaction that I have already entered into my back account. That is what I used the one step update for. I don't know about direct connect vs express web connect and I am not interested in this being a Quicken or banking problem. I just want ALL of my transactions, current date or future date to download into my Quicken file.

Chris_QPW

@Marty McGuire the syncing of the bill payment back to Quicken is part of the "bill pay" system through Direct Connect.  It doesn't matter where you submit the bill payment, they sync to each other.

Downloading transactions and downloading of bill payments are talking to two completely different systems at the financial institution, and that is why even with Direct Connect the financial institution has to put in the "plumbing" to talk to their bill payment system for this to work.

You might consider it insane to have to have a reminder or manually enter the payment in Quicken to see the future cashflow, but in truth that is exactly how most Quicken users have been doing it.  Direct Connect is only supported at about 2,000 financial institutions, and far less support bill pay through it.  In comparison over 15,000 financial institutions are supported with Express Web Connect (+).

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7922729/my-explanation-of-the-security-of-the-different-connection-types

Boatnmaniac

@Marty McGuire - BofA made the decision to stop supporting the connection method (Direct Connect) that has the capability to do what you are used to and still want.  They switched to a connection method (Express Web Connect+) that does not have that capability.  

There is nothing for Quicken to "fix" regarding this because the "fix" would be for BofA to reverse their decision and once again support Direct Connect.  If enough BofA customers complain about this to BofA then maybe at sometime in the future BofA will reverse course but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that to happen.

Your best bet for restoring that kind of functionality is to move your bank accounts to another bank that still offers Direct Connect with Bank Bill Pay.  A few that support this connection method and function for free are Wells Fargo, PNC Bank, Fifth Third Bank and Midland States Bank.  There are others that offer it, as well, but some (not all) will charge a monthly fee for it.  Just know that this new EWC+ protocol is something that other banks will be migrating to, as well.  We just don't know which ones and when.  Nor do we know which banks, if any, will stay with DC for the long haul.

What some others have done is to set up automatic payments in the online billers' accounts to pay off the statement amount in full each month by directly debiting the BofA account.  For these bills they then just need to enter a Bill Reminder transaction into their BofA accounts, not worry about having to also manually schedule the bill payments in the online BofA accounts and then let Quicken match the posted transactions later when they post.  It might not be enough to totally eliminate the need to enter all bill payments in the online BofA account and also to manually enter transactions in the BofA account in Quicken for them but it should reduce the need for this.

eosmond111

Not only does Bank of America no longer download future bill pay transactions; right now they are not downloading the transactions from the last two days. Odd.

Petersocal

To make this simple so people understand. The direct connect was a two way communication. Express Web Connect is a one way communication. BOFA is simply downloading (when it works). No information from Quicken is going back to BOFA. This seems to be the direction that most banks are taking. They would rather you use their bill pay on their website (app) and then simply download the transactions once they go through.

Chris_QPW

Petersocal said:

To make this simple so people understand. The direct connect was a two way communication. Express Web Connect is a one way communication. BOFA is simply downloading (when it works). No information from Quicken is going back to BOFA. This seems to be the direction that most banks are taking. They would rather you use their bill pay on their website (app) and then simply download the transactions once they go through.

One thing that was a surprise to me is that there is a whole group of people that were entering bill payments on the financial institution's bill payment website/system, and then relying on it downloading into Quicken.  This opposed to the people that were actually scheduling the bill payment in Quicken and having it sync to the financial institution's bill payment website/system.  It is in fact a two-way sync, where Quicken sort of plays the role of another GUI interface to the financial institution's bill payment system.

Even though the syncing from the financial institution's bill payment website/system is "downloading" it is still separate from the downloading of transactions and is still a feature that only Direct Connect has.
And people should notice that it can be supported or not, enable or not separate from Direct Connect downloading transactions.  It definitely is "extra" to the financial institution than just downloading transactions.

Not only is this system extra work/cost to them, but I'm also sure they don't like a third-party program like Quicken to be able to do transfers and bill payments on their system.  It could certainly be considered a security risk.

Marty McGuire

to those who responded to me, thank you, I think you got it through my thick head

bcsteves

I hope pending transactions is returned soon. It was in my opinion one of the most useful feature additions in a long time.