Calculate and Display the Difference between Online Balance and Ending Balance for an Account

njhawk71

I find myself manually calculating this fairly often when my Online Balance and Ending Balance don't match for an account (this happens more often than I'd like these days). I'm usually only missing one transaction... and if I could see the difference between the two it would help me determine which transaction is missing when looking through my online bank's transaction list.

splasher

I don't think you want the difference between online and ending, but online and current/ending depending if there are future transactions.

The online balance doesn't know about future transactions which would be included in the ending balance but not the current balance.  The current balance is not shown if there are no future transactions, so it gets tricky and you want to be very specific in what you ask for, otherwise the devs are liable to give you EXACTLY what you asked for and it not work as desired all of the time.

Oh, and now they are toying with the idea with including and not including pending transactions in the downloads and some FIs are already incorrectly including them in the online balances but not downloading.  It is a real can of worms at the moment.

Jim_Harman

I second @splasher's comment. Currently Bank of America updates its downloaded online balance for credit cards in the evening to include transactions that do not download until late at night. 

Chris_QPW

Jim_Harman said:

I second @splasher's comment. Currently Bank of America updates its downloaded online balance for credit cards in the evening to include transactions that do not download until late at night. 

That is exactly backwards from what I have seen at other financial institutions that download the transactions earlier in the day and update the online balance later.

The bottom line is that the financial institutions don't seem to be able to get this right, at least not for Express Web Connect (+).  They did seem to do better with Direct Connect, which is strange since you would think the source data is from the same place.  But I have caught the balances on Chase's own website to be inconsistent at times.

BTW for the Chase credit cards they have it right but mess up on the weekends and holidays for the checking accounts.