Fidelity Elan credit card account - online and register balance not equal (edit)

JonnyDollar

The online and register balances are not equal on my Fidelity Investments & Retirement credit card account - see attached screenshot. These balances were always equal until sometime last week.

The register balance and the balance on the Fidelity website are equal.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

Screenshot 2024-05-05 091152.png

JonnyDollar

I should add that the register balance and the balance on the Fidelity website are equal.

NotACPA

The Online Balance is downloaded, and reflects only what Fidelity knows.

The Ending Balance, in Q, includes any future dated transactions, which Fidelity would not have yet recorded.

What Fidelity is showing on the website (I'm their client also) is Today's amount, excluding future dated transactions and transactions that haven't yet cleared.

Ps56k2

Just reading along -
We have Fidelity Brokerage, IRA, and 403b (NetBenefits) - but no CC attached to any of them -
Clarification on your acct "wording" - is there actually a CC on the Retirement Account ?
Are there 3 accts or just 1 - Investments, Retirement, and CC ?

Fidelity Investments & Retirement credit card account 

JonnyDollar

Yes there is an actual CC in the Fidelity Investments & Retirement services, if applied for. The CC is actually issued by Elan Financial Services, but managed by Fidelity. The CC account is in my Fidelity Brokerage page.

Regarding the balances, the ending balance in Q matches the balance in the Fidelity website. The online balance is what is out of sink. Also, the difference between the Q ending balance and the online balance is not the pending transactions amount. Historically, there has been issues between Fidelity/Elan and Q, when it comes to balances matching.

leishirsute

I don't know if this is a problem yet, but transactions have not downloaded for Elan via Fidelity since 4/29/2024. There are 6 posted transactions not downloaded that are showing on the Elan website with a posted date as early as 5/2/2024. I'm hoping it's a normal delay, but expected the transactions to download when posted on the website. They show as posted both on the Fidelity website and Elan website.

UPDATE: I reset the Fidelity Elan connection in Quicken and 3 of the latest transactions posted on 5/6 downloaded into Quicken. However, the 3 transactions posted prior to 5/6 did not download and some of the unposted transactions are from the same grocery stores as the recently downloaded transactions. One would have supposed that the earlier transactions would have downloaded if later ones have downloaded for the same vendors (Whole Foods & Publix grocers). Now here's the rub. I did a test reconcile in Quicken and the balance matches for Elan, Quicken, and Fidelity. So, even though, the older posted transactions have not been downloaded into Quicken, they are also not reflected in the current balance. Strange. I hope they will eventually be downloaded into Quicken.

Which download connection is proving to be more reliable now for Elan credit card: Fidelity-Quicken or Elan-Quicken?

leishirsute

Update: After cross-referencing ELan, Fidelity and Quicken, I discovered that Quicken somehow put missing downloaded transaction values as the opening balance in the Elan credit card register. Once I changed the opening balance to $0.00 and manually entered the missing transactions, all is in sync again. Strange how Quicken changed the opening balance of the account though.

Boatnmaniac

Which download connection is proving to be more reliable now for Elan credit card: Fidelity-Quicken or Elan-Quicken?

For me, the Fidelity Investments & Retirement Accounts setup is working much, much more reliably than is the Elan Financial Services set up.

One issue with Elan that has been around for at least 1 year is that when running OSU in the morning newly posted transactions will download but the Online Balance does not update preventing Reconciling to the Online Balance. This issue self resolves when running OSU, again, that evening.

Another issue with Elan is that every once in a while the Online Balance will not include the cents. This used to only happen when doing Reset Account or Deactivate/Reactivate but since the Pending Transactions feature has become available it will sometimes happen even when Reset Account or Deactivate/Reactivate were not done and when Pending Transactions is turned off. Like in the past, this issue will usually self resolve by running OSU, again, 12-24 hrs later.

Compounding the issue for Elan, when download Pending Transactions is set up, is that sometimes downloaded pending transactions do not get removed when the posted transactions download or will sometimes get downloaded a second time during the next OSU but only one of them gets removed when the posted transaction is later downloaded.

Fidelity does not support downloading Pending Transactions (at least not yet) so none of these Pending Transactions issue occur with Fidelity.

Also, Fidelity does not download Online Balances with the cents not included.

Yesterday morning, for the first time with Fidelity, the Online Balance was updated to include 2 newly posted transactions but those transactions did not download so the register Balance and the Online Balance were out of sync. I ran OSU, again, in the evening and those 2 transactions then did download and Reconile to the Online Balance worked perfectly. This morning's OSU downloaded another posted transaction and the Online Balance was also correctly updated so hopefully yesterday's issue was just a fluke.

In my main data file I have been using the Fidelity connection setup for about 2 months without any significant issues identified.

In a test file I have both the Fidelity and Elan connections set up so I can compare and track their relative performance. Again, the Fidelity connection setup works very well but the Elan one is somewhat problematic.

Boatnmaniac

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20432859#Comment_20432859

The Fidelity Rewards Visa used to be able to be downloaded via Elan Financial Services and Fidelity Rewards Visa Credit Card. Both are EWC connections.

This Fidelity CC setup had a long history of being problematic but would usually work. However, starting last Sep it pretty much stopped working.

Then in Dec a new Fidelity EWC+ FI was set up called Fidelity - Investments & Retirement Accounts and in addition to investments and retirement accounts this CC can be downloaded with it. The Fidelity Rewards Visa Credit Card FI was then deactivated in the FIDIR and Add Account. This new FI has been working pretty well for me for the CC for the last 4 months (4 months in a test data file and 2 months in my main data file).

The Elan FI has had a pretty long reliable history for downloads but that started changing last Sep and got progressively worse by Nov. Not long after the new Fidelity EWC+ FI was available, the downloading and Online Balance issues with Elan got pretty bad. I tolerated it for about a month and then finally reauthorized the account (in my main data file) to the new Fidelity EWC+ FI and haven't regretted doing that one bit.

I also tried (in a test file) to reauthorize some Complete Tracking Fidelity Investments accounts with this new EWC+ FI and the transactions that were downloaded were junk. I then tried to set up new Complete Tracking accounts with this new EWC+ FI and got the same junk results. I then set up new Simple Tracking accounts with this EWC+ connection method where it seems to be working quite well. So, at least for QWin at this time, this new Fidelity EWC+ FI appears to support only Simple Tracking. Fortunately, DC is still available….whew!