Quicken programmers have messed up Bank of America customers [Edited]

Champ198

The programmers have once again started using the Bank of America "online balance" which contains non-settled items like debit pre-authorizations against the total balance. It's fine if you're determining money in your account but is wrong to use as the reconciliation balance.

Education for the Quicken programmers: pre-authorizations may never settle or be submitted by the merchant. Most of the time they do but some don't. My reconciliation is exactly off by what is not processed and settled. My account will never balance in Quicken even if I enter manually all of the unsettled transactions before they come through.

jacobs

It's funny that you're blaming the Quicken programmers, when it's BoA that is messing things up by sending to Quicken the pending balance rather than the posted balance. So the Quicken programmers need to construct an elaborate work-around to download the pending transactions and the pending balance, and then back them out of the balance for reconciliation. If BoA simply cancels a pending transaction like a pre-authorization, and doesn't send that cancellation to Quicken, Quicken's background tracking gets fouled up. And because Quicken can have transaction downloads in the cloud and from the desktop, and needs to keep them in sync, it can get very messy. There is an industry specification for electronic transaction communication between a financial institution and third-party software like Quicken, and it's likely the BoA programmers haven't got their t's crossed and I'd dotted.

I'm not saying this isn't a pain in the @$$. Nor that Quicken doesn't have to come up with a way to fix it. I'm just saying that the Quicken programmers certainly understand how pending transactions work, but they aren't the ones who made the mess.

Champ198

Hey, it's been accurate for years, Quicken made programming changes - it broke, then Quicken made updates to fix it, now it's broke. I pay Quicken an annual fee to maintain this and be aware of any changes to feeds and systems. Saying Quicken is not responsible is way out of line. I appreciate you defending them but why is the customer having to point this out first?

jacobs

No, BoA made changes, and Quicken has to try to keep up.

I only said Quicken isn't responsible creating for the problem; I didn't say Quicken isn't responsible for trying to figure out how to fix it.

As for pointing this out, there are multiple posts on this forum about this issue (such as this one), with BoA as well as a few other financial institutions which have switched their connectivity protocol.