Where have I been? Pending vs. Downloaded transactions

Question

Well, I cannot imagine why

1) I've never seen/noticed the "Pending Transactions" tab (bottom of the register) and

2) why I've not seen any of the many conversations here about pending transactions but, nevertheless…

I'm confused by the difference between downloaded and pending transactions.  I've never before seen or used pending.  Now I'm seeing, in my Costco Citi Visa register, 2 pending transactions from yesterday.  My last full OSU was late on 10/2.  I updated a single account (NOT the one in question) this morning 10/3.  The two pendings are from 10/2.  So possible they didn't come down in 10/2's OSU but were loaded with this morning's update of a different account?

I understand that gas stations and some other vendors put a "hold" on your account for an amount different than your purchase and that this would be problematic - IF those transactions were entered into the register.  But the 2 pendings that I see were not auto-entered in my register.

If I have no interest in seeing pending transactions until they become legitimate, downloaded transactions - do I need to turn off or hide the Pending tab (is that possible?), or just continue to ignore them?  What would make them move from this tab into my register?

Boatnmaniac · Answer

Transactions listed in the Pending Transactions tab below the account register are, IMO, a very helpful thing.  These are transactions that have a pending status at the financial institution but have not yet posted there.  They will often show up shortly after completing the transaction with a payee so it is a good visibility to what should be downloading in a couple of days as posted transactions.

I use the information there to verify that the pending transactions information matches my physical, emailed or texted transaction receipts or to give me a heads-up that I might have misplaced a receipt or perhaps that my account has been fraudulently compromised.   If everything looks OK, I will often manually enter the transactions into the register to match what is on the Pending Transactions tab.

As you noted, there are a few times when what is shown in the Pending Transactions tab is not correct.  Typically these are the account verification or temporary hold charges by businesses like gas stations and restaurants where the final amount of the transactions is not known at the time the charge was first transacted by the business.  Sometimes, these pending charge amounts will get updated to the final correct amount by the next day or so but sometimes they will not get updated.

Once they have been downloaded as posted, they usually disappear from the Pending Transactions tab either the same day of the download or within the next 1-2 days.  Once in a while they are not automatically removed within 1-2 days and when that happens the transaction in the Pending Transactions tab can be manually deleted by clicking on the Delete button for it.

What I recommend not doing is to select the option to include pending transactions in the current and ending balances.  Selecting this option will actually add the pending transactions to the account register and they will then decrement or increment the account balance which can sound appealing to some people.  But this option has been problematic in that in some situations when the posted transactions download they will not be matched with the pending transactions that were previously entered into the register by Quicken. That then causes a duplicate transactions issue requiring one of the duplicates to be manually deleted from the register.

For those who wish to take advantage of the Pending Transactions feature, here are the settings that I recommend.:

Sceptic · Answer

@EmKay go to Edit→Preferences→Pending transactions, and then verify that the Pending transaction option is turned off.

If it is on, before turning it off, click on "Account Settings" and uncheck all FIs listed.  Click OK and then turn Pending transactions off.