Chase Pending Transactions Causing Reconcile Issue

This is not a Quicken issue, nor is it specific to Chase.  This sometimes happens with some of my accounts, including Chase, Sears Mastercard (Citi), US Bank, PNC Bank and Midland States Bank.  Sometimes it is that the Online Balance includes transactions which have not yet downloaded into Quicken.  Other times there are new transactions that have downloaded but the downloaded Online Balance does not yet include the dollars of those newly downloaded transactions.

The Financial Institution (FI) determines which data is to be downloaded into Quicken.  OSU and Update Now simply takes the data that the FIs provide.  Quicken has no knowledge of what the FIs includes in the Online Balance and whether or not it is accurate...it simply takes that data at face value.

There are a lot of theories floating around as to what causes this issue.  One is that many FIs in the last 1-2 yrs have started to provide "Available Balance" information (which includes pending transactions) to their customers in their online accounts and that they are also downloading that same data to Quicken.  Another is that it might be a timing issue with the FI's server updates finalizing the end of business day data and that the snapshot provided to Quicken includes server updates that are not fully completed (i.e., the Online Balance has been updated but the posted transactions are not yet updated/provided for the download or the inverse of that).

Regardless of the cause, generally this issue will resolve after running OSU or Update Now 12-24 hours later (often times in less than 12 hrs).  This, however, might not resolve so quickly if there are transactions that occur nearly every day.

Some people have decided they do not wish to wait 12-24 hrs so Reconciliation to the Online Balance can be successfully completed.  What many of these people have done is to turn off Reconcile to the Online Balance and have switched to manual Reconciliation (to Statements or the online account register).

Another thing that some people have done is to stop using OSU and Update Now for these affected accounts.  Instead they have opted to use Web Connect (manually download data from their account and import that into their accounts in Quicken).  Unfortunately, Chase no longer supports Web Connect so it is not an option for Chase accounts.

What is Quicken/Intuit doing to resolve this issue with the FIs?  I can't tell you.  I do know that this last Sep a feature was added to Quicken to allow downloads of pending transactions into Quicken.  Maybe this was part of an effort to resolve this issue.  But this feature was causing a lot of problems for users so it was turned off very quickly.  Quicken has stated that it will remain turned off until such time that the issues with it that were identified have been resolved.