Reconciliation Question
When Quicken is pulling my transactions from my bank account it's pulling all of my pending transactions as well. How do I make this stop? My account is never reconciling and it's driving me crazy!
Answers
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@JamieSan , although this may not be what you want I use a different approach which avoids the problem and works well. Instead of having Quicken pull the data, I log into my bank account, download the transactions (which allows me to specify what is / is not downloaded) and then double click on the file and voila, it is imported into Quicken.
I hope this helps!
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What financial institution is this for?
And is it really downloading the pending transactions, or are you talking about it adding in the pending transactions in the Online Balance when it shouldn't (which is much more common of a problem, than actually downloading pending transactions)?
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@Chris_QPW , I am guessing that the pending transactions may be credit acrd related or e-payment related (when the user specifies a deferred payment). What do you think?
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@JoelC I don't know, that is why I asked. It is extremely rare that pending transactions are downloaded by mistake, and the original statement was about reconciling. Almost every time this is the case the financial institution is including the pending transaction in the Online Balance and the user is trying to reconcile to that. The solution is to stop reconciling to the Online Balance and do it to the "Statement Balance" (which can be just the balance they get from the financial institution's website).
I have seen some crazy combinations for instance for Chase, for online checking accounts, and only on weekends or holidays it will include the pending transactions in the Online Balance.
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@JoelC
I don't know, that is why I asked. It is extremely rare that pending transactions are downloaded by mistake, and the original statement was about reconciling. Almost every time this is the case the financial institution is including the pending transaction in the Online Balance and the user is trying to reconcile to that. The solution is to stop reconciling to the Online Balance and do it to the "Statement Balance" (which can be just the balance they get from the financial institution's website).
Fair enough. I would hope people would always reconcile to teh statement balance as that is the "source of truth"!
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@JamieSan The other "solution" for the time being is not to reconcile your account to the online balance Quicken is receiving from the bank. Instead, reconcile to your monthly bank statement, where you enter the balance and ending date on the statement, and then check off in Quicken each item on the statement. Only mark as cleared in Quicken those transactions which appear on the bank statement; if Quicken has received any pending transactions not on the bank statement, simply leave them uncleared in Quicken. Doing it this way, your reconciliation will work every time.
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@Chris_QPW It is pulling my pending transactions from my bank account they always have a check number as well and they aren't checks and they are showing cleared.
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It is pulling my pending transactions from my bank account they always have a check number as well and they aren't checks and they are showing cleared.
Every downloaded transaction typically shows the blue cleared checkmark. (I wasn't sure about pending transactions, since my bank an most banks don't download pending transactions.) If there's a check number, then your bank is sending that data.
(I'm curious: when the transactions subsequently clear the bank for real, does anything change in Quicken? Like, do the bogus check numbers go away? Or if the amount changes, such as a restaurant transaction where the amount changes from the original pending charge to the post-tip final amount?)
In any case, if you do as I mentioned above, reconciling to a bank statement, you will just uncheck any transactions which are not on the statement, and your reconciliation will work. (You may want to start your reconciliation by clicking the Mark all as Uncleared button, removing the blue checkmarks from every transaction in the reconcile window, and then manually checking transactions one at a time as you proceed down the bank statement.)
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The problem with pending transactions showing up in Quicken is one that the Quicken folks have clearly been wrestling with for some time. Quicken was originally developed maintaining a permanent list of the unique transaction ID numbers on each transaction is received from each financial institution; when it downloaded an existing number a second or subsequent time, it discarded it as a duplicate. But then the OFX specification for transaction downloads was revised to allow financial institutions to transmit pending transactions, identified as such, and to remove or modify them subsequently. That means Quicken now needs to evaluate duplicate transaction ID downloads to distinguish between the same transaction downloading again versus an update to a previously downloaded pending transaction where the status and possibly the amount has changed. They clearly haven't perfected it, likely because different financial institutions do some things differently.
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