Bank of America pending transactions again

hoffmandh

It appears to me that once again account balances from Bank of America are reflecting Pending Transactions. Since the transactions don't download, it is impossible to reconcile. Are other Community members having this problem again? Is there a solutions?

Quicken Jasmine

Hello @hoffmandh,

Thank you for taking the time to visit the Community to report this issue, though we apologize that you are experiencing this.

We have forwarded this issue to the proper channels to have this further investigated. However, we request that you please navigate to Help > Report a problem from within your Quicken program and submit a problem report with log files attached in order to contribute to the investigation. While you will not receive a response through this submission, these reports will help our teams further investigate the issue. The more problem reports we receive, the better.

We apologize for any inconvenience in the meantime! Thank you.
(CTP-6049)

Greg Lampe

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.

checkyourmirrors

Happening with Q4M as well as of this morning

mb66

I have been seeing this for months. Once you are aware, it is easy to see what is going on if you look at the BofA website transaction register. It is really annoying and another waste of time to have to log in and verify that it why the account doesn't reconcile on a particular day.

Quicken Jared

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

Ken B.

So yes, this is annoying and Quicken should fix it... (1- Bank of America, in my case & 2) Deluxe R47.15, Build 27.1.47.15

But I think I figured out a workaround... When the online balance includes pending transactions, enter the pending transactions into the register manually and reconcile as if they have already cleared.

Then when the pending transactions at the bank "catch up" and get downloaded, go back to the original ones you manually entered and previously reconciled against, put them back into "unreconciled" / "uncleared" status.

Then select each one of the manually entered transaction and "match to downloaded transaction" (an option when you click on the "uncleared" column). That will merge them into a single transaction that you can then re-reconcile against and everything balances.

A pain, but it "fixes it".

jeromelw

I'd like to +1 on this issue being super annoying. Can someone from Quicken explain why this is happening again? I never found out if this was an issue on BofA's side or Quicken's side when it occurred previously. If it is a Quicken issue, please fix it again.

Chris_QPW

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20344122#Comment_20344122

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.

Rocket J Squirrel

@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.

Chris_QPW

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20344132#Comment_20344132

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.

Rocket J Squirrel

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.

Chris_QPW

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.

Rocket J Squirrel

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.