This morning I spent 45 minutes trying to figure out why I could not get my BofA Checking account to reconcile to zero, something I do every day. I finally figured out that Quicken had included 2 transactions in the balance that were still “processing” at BofA, so the transactions did not download.
Hello @checkyourmirrors ,
We are sorry that you are being affected by issues with online banking services. Thank you for telling us about this here on the Quicken Community.
First, is this issue occuring with your Bank of America accounts, exclusively? To further specify: are you noticing that pending transactions are included in online balances? I also want to confirm that by ‘Q4M,’ you mean ‘Quicken for Mac,’ yes?
Thank you,
Quicken Jared
Here is my evaluation of this. Note that because of the lack of tranparency by Quicken Inc/Intuit/financial institution one has to make assumptions that might not be correct, but I'm pretty sure most of these.
Happens to both Quicken Windows and Quicken Mac without either getting an updated version of Quicken. To me that rules out code changing in those programs.
The data follows to Quicken (the program) from the Quicken servers/Quicken cloud dataset. This is going to be pretty generic code. They aren't going to be picking up a different balance based which financial institution it is. The next party in this data flow is Intuit (Quicken Inc's aggregator). If code in the Quicken servers were changed you would expect this to affect all the financial institutions, and it isn't.
Next step is the Intuit servers/scripts. With Express Web Connect there isn't any standard between on how to get the data from the financial institution and as such it is possible to have different things happen for different financial institutions. But Express Web Connect + uses the FDX standard between Intuit and the financial institution. As such the field used for the online balance isn't going to “jump around”. And again if Intuit change which field they are using, it would be for all financial institutions.
That leaves financial institution that has chosen to put the wrong balancing into the field of the data passed to Intuit. Further more Chase has a problem where the pending transactions for checking accounts only (not sure about savings accounts) and only on the weekends are including the pending transactions in the online balance. It is impossible that this can be caused by any other part of the system than Chase.
@Chris_QPW : A pain, but it "fixes it".
I have a better “fix.” Don't auto-reconcile after every download. IMHO, reconciling to online balance is a misfeature which no one should use. Reconcile monthly against the FI statement and I guarantee you will never see this issue.
I don't auto-reconcile, but I do reconcile to the online balance after every download. Note you should never mix auto-reconcile with automatic transaction entry mode even though they allow it.
For the most part it has worked pretty well for me, and I do like the fact that I know at any given time I'm reconciled, but you are correct, that if people didn't use this feature they wouldn't have the problem.
And that is the sad part about Quicken the list; of features that you shouldn't use in Quicken because they will cause you problems is VERY long. That is what I have said for many years. Gaining experience with Quicken has a lot to do with knowing what features to avoid.
I do like the fact that I know at any given time I'm reconciled
The Online Balance displayed at the bottom of the register provides that information in a form good enough for me. I can see that it matches the register balance as of the last cleared transaction. If necessary, I can temporarily sort by Cleared to see the true cleared balance in the Balance column.
I reconciled to statement for most of the time I have used Quicken so it is certainly a viable way of doing it. On the other hand, Quicken's “features” tend to make for a lot of frustration for the average person. What other program do you know that experienced people using it keep telling you, yeah that would be a good feature, but it doesn't work right so don't use it?
I have the luxury that I don't really need to use Quicken, and do it more as a hobby than anything else, so if something doesn't work right it isn't much a big deal to me, but it is really a pain to tell people that they shouldn't use this feature or that because it doesn't work right even those if it did, it would be very beneficial for them.
The only things I look at on my statements are Ending Balance and Ending Date. Plug those in and I'm reconciled in seconds, once a month. Doing it more often seems like a bother.
Only if my reconcile fails to zero out do I need to examine the full statement. When that happens what I find is always user error.
I don't have the luxury of not using a personal finance application. I could never track and understand my investments without one. This is also user error in a sense; I have accumulated too many investments over time to handle without the help of software.
