"Pending Transactions" (new?) is not playing well with reconciliation

Question

I've been watching (troubleshooting) this since 9/11 and finally figured out that if there are "Pending Transactions" following a download from a lender, and the account is configured to "Reconcile Using Online Balance" it won't automatically reconcile without manually deselecting the pending transactions in that window. Quicken assumes that if the transaction is downloaded, it is cleared even though it is marked a pending. I have a manual workaround, but why are these hotfixes adding to our workload?

Both JP Morgan Chase (Amazon Prime Visa) and First Security Bank of Searcy exhibit this issue.

Chris_QPW · Answer

It is my guess that @JimC52's problem is from what the financial institution is doing and doesn't have anything to do with the pending transactions feature of Quicken.  And that @Boatnmaniac's original question has to be answered properly to understand what is really going on.  There is a known problem that some financial institutions send pending transactions as if they are posted transactions.  They will appear in Quicken as regular transactions and not be flagged by Quicken's pending transactions feature.  This is a bug in what data the financial institution is sending, and they have to fix it.  If this is the case, you can try contacting Quicken support to see if they can help with getting that message to the financial institution.

To that end I'm going to go through how the pending feature in Quicken actually works.

@JimC52 Do you have this preference on or off?

The answer affects what you see with pending transactions, it also affects whether if you should be using automatic reconciling or not.

If the above option is off, then "pending transactions" appear in the Pending Transactions tab:

If the above preference is on, then the pending transactions appear in the register sort of like the same as when they show scheduled reminders in the register except that the first blue dot/status column will have "Pending" in it.

The important part of all of this is they aren't officially in the register.  In the case of the Pending Transactions tab clearly, they haven't made it into the register yet.  In the case if "Automatically add to banking registers" they are in the register but have the "Pending" status and the CLR field will be blank.

The import part of all of this is that pending transaction never appear in the reconcile window because they aren't official in the register yet.

And I want to mention this about the "Include in current & balance" preference.

You will notice in my screenshot that the checkboxes aren't grayed out, but in @GeoffG 's they are.  The reason is because @GeoffG has the "Automatically add to banking registers" preference off and as such there is no way these transactions can affect the current and ending balance in the register, his pending transactions are in the Pending Transactions tab.  This preference is only for people that are using "Automatically add to banking registers".  They can decide if the pending transactions should affect the current and ending balances in the register.  But in all cases, the pending transactions are not included in the reconcile and the CLR field is blank.

And a general note about using "Automatically add to banking registers" and automatic reconcile.  Reconciling is to the amounts, and doing a reconcile clears the "Review" status, so these two should never be used together even though Quicken allows it.

The proper way to use "Automatically add to banking registers" is when the transactions come in and are placed in the register the transactions will get the status of either New or New Match.  The user should review them to make sure that they are all correct for things like the category.  Only after that should they either mark them reviewed or run a reconcile which will in turn mark them as reviewed.

When "Automatically add to banking registers" is off, the "reviewing" is done in the Downloaded Transactions tab as the use accepts the transactions into the register.  Once that is done, that is when automatic reconcile is triggered in this mode.  And the problem @Boatnmaniac mentioned in his last comment is the opposite problem.  As in the financial institution downloads only the posted transactions, but includes the pending transactions in the online balance that the reconcile is using.  So, in that case you are "missing transaction" not "have extra (pending) transactions" in the reconcile.

[Edited - Removed partial account numbers]

Boatnmaniac · Answer

Another thing:  With EWC and EWC+ accounts, it is not uncommon for new transactions to download but the online balance to not download until later in the day or the next morning.  When you see this issue occurring, try running OSU or Update Now, again, 12-24 hrs later and see if the reconciliation process can then be completed.

JimC52 · Answer

I've honestly never seen that Pending Transactions Preferences window before, but in checking mine I find that 3 of 4 were enabled to Show with 0 of 4 enabled to Include. I also noticed that each of your accounts is a credit card (no checking or savings accounts listed). The 3 accounts that are enabled to Show in my config are all from the same institution and are checking, savings, and credit card. (I wonder if this is institution related?) I have enabled the 4th account which is a credit card from a different institution and will look for different results after my morning download.

Possibly related - all 4 of my transaction accounts are set to Reconcile using Online Balance.