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quicken is including pending transactions?

JoeCal

Quicken 2023 for Windows is auto reconciling, even though there is a pending transaction in online banking.

My online balance is the same as my ending balance and Quicken support tells me it is the banks fault?

I could easily do an Excel spreadsheet and drop the subscription. Those 2 balances should never match and Quicken should not reconcile if there is a pending transaction.

It is not downloading the pending transaction but it is included in the balances!

Am I right? It wasn't like this when I started using Quicken in 2007.

Thanks for any help.

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Comments

Tom Young

The issue of pending transactions being included in the online balance has been something of a chronic problem for a while now, especially as more and more financial institutions have dropped Direct Connect as the downloading method in favor of EWC+. (The changeover is not at all unexpected as the financial institutions have a financial incentive to do so. The change is often justified as being more secure, a very questionable assertion.)

"My online balance is the same as my ending balance" "Those 2 balances should never match"

Well, they certainly can match, obviously, but I expect what you're telling us is that you practice "good housekeeping" by manually entering all charges you make with the credit card on the day of the charge, and in that case you would expect that the two numbers would not match if you use the card very frequently. To a large extent that's exactly what I do, but I've never adopted the "auto reconcile" approach to my credit card Accounts, choosing to do reconciliations to statements, and doing that reconciliation pretty much as soon as the statement becomes available online, making the reconciliation very "timely." Accordingly the Online Balance just doesn't attract my attention much, if at all.

I have no idea who's fault it is in the situation where pending transactions get included in the Online Balance, and it might have even occurred in my own file without me noticing.

JoeCal

I don't manually enter anything. And this is my checking account.

Online Balance and ending balance CAN'T match unless all banking transactions are cleared, and I have a pending transaction that Quicken didn't download, but included it in my ending balance which is wrong.

Chris_QPW

There is old saying "garbage in, garbage out". Quicken will only be as good as the data it gets.

The Online Balance comes from the financial institution and is supposed to be consistent with the rest of the data it sends (the transactions). If it isn't, Quicken has no way of knowing that or correcting for that.

The current rules are the financial institution shouldn't be sending any information about the pending transactions. If they violate that rule, then all bets are off.

My online balance is the same as my ending balance and Quicken support tells me it is the banks fault?

I don't manually enter anything. And this is my checking account.

It seems to me there is some kind of inconsistency in the above statement.

The "Online Balance" in Quicken isn't the one you see at the financial institution. Or more correctly, it isn't the one you might see at the top of the web page. At any given time, there are several balances. There is the one that includes pending, the one that excludes pending and the one that is your available balance. These can all be the same of different with different conditions.

The financial institution should be sending a consistent balance for the online balance based on the rules given (no pending transactions included, and it isn't the available balance either). In reality, if one day the rules changed and pending transactions were being sent that would be fine, the problem is with it isn't consistent.

If your financial institution can't send consistent data, then yes you can go to Excel spreadsheets if you want, but the other way to do this is to ignore the inconsistent data and provide the right number. In other words, drop reconciling to the downloaded online balance and supply the right number yourself (Manual reconcile).

This is the "Online Balance" that Quicken uses:

JoeCal

Chris,

I don't know what to say.

Yesterday I downloaded from Quicken and my checking account shows 2 balances on the bottom of the screen. Online Balance and ending balance.

Yesterday, since there were MANY pending items. these balances didn't match, and they shouldn't, just like what you pasted above.

This morning I noticed my online banking transactions all cleared except one that remained pending, so I used Quicken to update everything, and when I did that, The Online Balance and ending balance matched and auto reconciled my checking account, and that shouldn't have happened.

Quicken support puts blame on the bank and the bank puts blame on Quicken.

Like you say, garbage in, garbage out. I think I am making too big deal of this anyway. My bank just went through a merger and changes are happening every month. I think what I will do is use Quicken manually so I have a record of everything I do, but on the 21st of each month I will download the closing statement from my online account and save it as an Excel spreadsheet and reconcile the old school way.

I usually never reconcile and just trust what is online, and if I see something wrong, I dispute it but that hasn't happened.

Thanks for the response.

Chris_QPW

The Online Balance and ending balance matched and auto reconciled my checking account, and that shouldn't have happened.

I don't understand this statement. That is exactly what should happen. Again, the only criteria for a proper reconcile to the online balance is that the data sent (the transactions and the balance) are consistent. Depending on several factors the "online balance" on the financial institution's website and the one Quicken gets can be different. One of those factors are pending transactions, but depending on what balance you are looking at there can be other reasons like available balance.

Note it isn't unusual at all for financial institutions to have these inconsistent and certain times of the day and then be consistent at another time of day.