Chase Online Balance included Pending Deposits this morning.

It has been noted recently that:

1. The problem is only with checking accounts, not credit cards.
2. The problem seems to be only on weekends and holidays.  Yours seems to violate this last part, but that was my understanding of the problem based on my experience and this thread: https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20316433/#Comment_20316433

Richard Teitelman said:

I wonder if the fact that when I had the problem again the other day when I opened this thread that the pending transactions being counted incorrectly in the balance were all credits has anything to do with it. The three times it worked before that, the pending transactions were all debits. I don't understand why this is so hard to fix. Quicken just needs to use the balance not counting ANY pending transactions.

The online balance comes from the financial institution.  How is Quicken supposed to know what the online balance is without the pending transactions when the pending transactions aren't included in the transactions that are downloaded?

This is in fact something that Chase has to fix.

If the pending transactions were being sent and are marked as pending then maybe it could figure it out from an online balance that does or doesn't have them (if it knows which is the case), but in reality, the whole point of the financial institution sending the online balance is so that Quicken has what the financial institution believes it is, not some calculation that Quicke might make.

Well it might be a little more complicated than that.

First off I just caught Chase being inconsistent with his balances even on their own website.  It was for investment accounts but you get the point.  Here's a link to that comment: 
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20318426/#Comment_20318426

Beyond that Chase and Intuit communicate with the standardized protocol but it isn't in the public domain so I don't know what it supports it may or may not support sending the two needed online balances.  I do know that they just recently tried to turn on showing pending transactions and at least at this point they couldn't get all the balances and quicken to be correct.  

bwca7 said:

I see this issue. It affects me greatly when trying to reconcile and reconciling is not possible. You cannot reconcile when the balance you are given includes pending transactions. EXTREMELY frustrating. You cannot balance your checkbook. I have noticed that you can download on weekends but obviously, the bank does not work on weekends. So, balances will be most current during weekdays. But regardless, the balance you are given seems to always include pending transactions.

If you are in a dire strait to reconcile and can't wait you can always switch the reconciling to the "statement" which can be a balance, you see on the financial institution's website not just the actual statement balance.

Richard Teitelman said:

I tried opening a ticket with Quicken support/chat and the basic answer was they told me how I can reconcile manually. Great. I wrote "I would accept an answer of "Yes, Chase is aware of this but they have no intention of changing things on their end to provide Quicken with a balance that does not include pending transactions." Can you comment on that ? and the answer "Well, whats happening is that Quicken receives the online balance provided by the bank, in this situation by Chase. We can't really know if it includes pending transactions or not, since the bank would not provide that information." Thus, the problem is never going to be fixed. I guess Quicken has no leverage with the banks. and my last comment is that this MUST be an issue with every bank that uses EWC+ The value of the online balance field must be defined somewhere or is each bank free to use whatever value they want?

There is no way that this is a fundamental problem with Express Web Connect + and there isn't any way that Chase can't fix it, if they put in enough effort.  Whether they will is another story.

Think of it this way, they had the same information right for Direct Connect.

When talking about Express Web Connect one could never know if one financial institution provided the data to Intuit what format and if Intuit was "searching" for the data, and therefore even though it was unlikely might have been the problem.

With both Direct Connect/OFX and Express Web Connect +/FDX you have a set protocol, with given fields.  Now I haven't ever seen the definition of the FDX protocol, but that part is certainly going to be true.

One has to realize that in both cases the data doesn't reside in the "protocol" or even in the OFX server.  It resides in the financial institution's databases.  So, you are looking at a "request" by Intuit for the information using the given protocol and then the financial institution has to be running some program to get the data and send it back using that protocol.

In the case of Chase, the problem has a history like this.  At the time of the switch over to Express Web Connect + pending transactions were being included in the online balance at all times, and for all account types.  Then over time they mostly fix this.  Credit card accounts don't have this problem, and checking accounts only have this problem on weekends and holidays.  There is no way the "FDX protocol" can change in this way.  It is just as clear that whatever program they are using for fetching this data has changed from when it was done for Direct Connect, and has a bug in it that it will get the wrong balance at times.

Richard Teitelman said:

Thanks for that. Is there a way now in Quicken for me to enable getting pending transactions downloaded. I assume if I do, then the balance issue will go away since pending transactions will be included in the download and in the available balance. Right? I could live with that since I can think of only one or two times where a pending transaction was revoked by the bank.

No, as it sits right now you can’t tell Quicken to download the pending transactions.  Ironically, just about the time when Chase was changed over to Express Web Connect + Quicken came out of a release that did allow for downloading the pending transactions.  It was quickly turned off when it was discovered that some of the balances in Quicken were not correct.  Plus there was problems where they were temporary, and another where they were treated like the reminders where they are sort of there, but not editable, and people found ones that wouldn’t go away and couldn’t be deleted.  A real mess.  This also confused people that with calling pending bill payments, “pending transaction” that went away when Direct Connect went away.

Chris_QPW had commented in another thread that this is a Chase problem.  I agree. Since Chase just operates Mon-Fri it makes sense they wouldn't provide updates until the next business day.  Same for holidays since they are closed. So perhaps EWC+ would work 7 days a week if Chase just provides the updates on weekends and holidays. I did an online bill pay today on the Chase website and it said it wouldn't be processed until Monday (i.e. the next business day).

> @Chris_QPW said:
> If you are in a dire strait to reconcile and can't wait you can always switch the reconciling to the "statement" which can be a balance, you see on the financial institution's website not just the actual statement balance.

I did this and it worked. The sad thing is that you are forced to check the last posted balance by the bank (Chase) and use that while doing your reconciling using the paper statement method. The caveat being that you must have already downloaded all of your transactions up to that point.