Please for the love of all mankind..please enable downloads of pending transactions! (Q Mac)

@blue68qkn The problem is that different financial institutions show balances differently. Some show the balance only including posted transactions, while separately showing and available balance (credit limit minus current balance ) which includes pending transactions. Quicken is at the mercy of what each financial institution reports, whether they encode pending transactions as such when they download, and whether the balance they report to Quicken does or does not include pending transactions. (If you previously saw pending transactions included in your online balance and now you don't, it's likely because your financial institution changed what they send to Quicken.)

Voting for this idea & posting here is how you get it corrected.

Personally I don't want pending transactions to download.

@Jon said: Personally I don't want pending transactions to download.

I agree, because some of them are pre-authorizations or pre-final amounts.

But I think the issue is that if pending transactions aren't imported, then in some cases people can't reconcile to their reported online balance. It seems to me Quicken has to have a way to get the pending transactions and adjust the online balance by that amount so the register and online balance can be in sync.

I want to see in Quicken, show in its top right corner, View Online Balance, the balance that the bank calculates taking into consideration pending transactions. Once again, it use to.

As I mentioned in a post above, different financial institutions handle pending transactions differently — some include them in their online balance but don't download the transactions, while others do download the pending transactions to Quicken. And this can vary from one bank to another, and can change over time at any particular bank if they update their online systems.

But you're complaint/wish isn't really about asking Quicken to download and show pending transactions at all; it's about having Quicken's "Online Balance" match the financial institution's "Available Balance".

I don't typically look at Online Balance in Quicken; I use Today's Balance for both my registers and sidebar, so I'm typically unaware of discrepancies. But I switched to Online Balance and see that my bank is operating exactly as you're asking for: the "Online Balance" in Quicken matches what the bank shows on its website as my "Available Balance". That's true even though a direct deposit today shows in my transaction list on the bank site, but has not yet been downloaded to Quicken. So my "Online Balance" and "Today's Balance" in Quicken are understandably different values, as the former includes today's deposit and the latter does not. But the Online Balance reflects what the bank tells Quicken the balance is, so Quicken's Online Balance should match the bank's Available Balance.

That is clearly not the case in the two screenshots you posted above. So I believe it's an issue with your bank which needs to be reported to Quicken Support to escalate to their connectivity provider, Intuit, to in turn reach out to the bank to note the discrepancy and ask them to fix the data they are providing to Quicken.

The Online Balance comes directly from the financial institution, and should NEVER have the pending transactions included in it.

@Chris_QPW I agree… but there are such discrepancies. Here's what I found as I was testing a few things today:

Today, I had a $10,000 direct deposit from a brokerage account into my checking account. When I look on the bank website, the deposit is there, and it is reflected in the balance shown on the website. This transaction does not show as pending. When I do an update in Quicken, this deposit transaction has not yet downloaded to Quicken. But if I look at the "Online Balance" in Quicken, that deposit is reflected in the balance, because the bank is sending Quicken the online balance including the deposit. So if I were trying to reconcile to the online balance in Quicken, I have a $10k discrepancy in the amount of the deposit.

So why is this? The connection shows it is FDP/OAuth (Quicken Connect on my Mac, EWC+ on Windows.) So to explore further, I downloaded a QFX file from the bank website to look at it, and the deposit transaction is right there, there first transaction:

<STMTTRN>
<TRNTYPE>DIRECTDEP
<DTPOSTED>20260127120000
<TRNAMT>10000.00
<FITID>61055763271202601270080000
<NAME>SCHWAB BROKERAG
<MEMO>Direct Deposit
</STMTTRN>

Well, that looks like a normal transaction to me — e.g. no apparent coding to denote this as a pending transaction — but somehow Quicken is not adding this transaction to my register. Why? I'm guessing that it is not in the QFX data Quicken is pulling down online and wondering: is it possible that Quicken's online connection isn't pulling in transactions in real-time on demand (like Direct Connect would), and is limited to what a Quicken server downloaded last night? That would account for this transaction not yet downloading to my desktop, while the online balance is up-to-date. And if so, I don't know how Quicken can ever resolve such mismatches unless every download connects directly to the financial institution server and pulls down up-to-date transactions.

Does Quicken Mac have a "cloud sync" log? Express Web Connect + on Quicken Windows is logged in the cloud sync log.

@Chris_QPW In Quicken Mac, there is a local OFXLog.txt file, but nothing like a "cloud sync" file that I'm aware of. (I have Quicken Cloud sync turned Off, for what that's worth.) I've never really looked at the OFXLog.txt file before, and it's got a lot of stuff that I can't decipher as easily as a downloaded QFX/OFX file. There's stuff in there going back to 2021, including info for investments even though I don't think I have ever connected an investment account in this data file; (maybe I did in testing years ago?). But searching the file by date and by amount, I can't even find any of the recent transactions which downloaded to my checking account today or in the past week, so I'm pretty confused what I'm seeing. I'd need to create a new, clean data file, connect it to my bank, download once, and see what's in this file to try to make heads or tails of it (and I don't have time to do that tonight).

My question was whether Quicken (Intuit) logs into sites to download transactions once a night, process them, and stored them until a user comes along and downloads to their desktop — from the transactions stored on Quicken's server, rather than reaching out to the FI in real-time. I know that used to be the case in the screen-scraping days, but I don't know if the once-a-day downloads are now completely gone. Otherwise, I can't explain how my deposit transaction today still hasn't downloaded to Quicken, but likely will do so tomorrow.

@blue68qkn I don't know how you can get Quicken to look into this other than contacting Quicken Support again and hoping you get a more responsive represenative. I would suggest not mentioning pending downloads, and simply saying you are having a problem because the displayed Quicken "Online Balance" does not match the balance shown on your bank's website, when those two values should be the same. Ask if they can do a screen share with you (I don't know if you've done this in your prior efforts) so you can show them how your bank's website and the Quicken Online Balance are different, making it impossible to reconciled to the Online Balance in Quicken.

@Chris_QPW A quick follow-up to two things we were discussing yesterday…

(1) I reported that I had a direct deposit in my checking account yesterday, and Quicken Mac reflected the amount of that deposit in the "Online Balance" but the transaction itself did not download into the register. Thus the Quicken Online Balance agreed with the bank websites balance, but internally in Quicken, the Online Balance did not agree with the register running balance. As I expected, this morning the deposit transaction downloaded into Quicken. My conclusion is that Quicken apparently does a real-time query of the FI to fetch the online balance, but only downloads transactions once a day. This may or may not be the same for different financial institutions. And this is a different than what @blue68qkn is showing where his Quicken Online Balance does not match his bank website's balance.

(2) We talked about a transaction log, and I said that Quicken Mac has a OFXLog.txt file which records some information about download sessions. I'm unclear about what is and isn't logged here upon a closer look today. I did not find the deposit which downloaded today, or any recent transaction, in the file. It seems to have lots of transaction from 2021 through mid-2024, but nothing past July 2024. (So at least I know that it wasn't the this bank's change from EWC to EWC+ in late 2025 which altered what is recorded in the file.) The only change in the file after this morning's download is a few lines at the end of the file with a timestamped "Start Update All" and timestamped "End Update". So I'm not sure if there's a local file with a log of the actual transactions downloaded any more.

In general, what I do is never trust a "failed reconcile" on the first day, and in some cases never on a weekend. I just cancel it and wait till the next day or after the weekend before I look for a problem. 99.99% of the time for my financial institutions that works. But note that if you have a lot of pending transactions and that is the problem you might never find a stable situation.

Or simply switch to doing monthly reconciliations to the bank/credit card statement. No pending transactions. No mismatch between what's counted in one place and not in another. It's a straightforward and 100% accurate matching of posted transactions at the financial solution to transactions in Quicken. I never have any issues reconciling this way. 😀

I have seen reports (VERY RARE) where some financial institution actually messes up, and the posting date of some transactions are after the closing date for the statement even though they are included in that statement. I don't know about Quicken Mac, but Quicken Windows doesn't include transactions with a posting date after the ending date (entered or from the online balance information).

Should that happen — which I agree is very rare — in Quicken Mac all you need to do is change the reconciliation date forward by a day or two so the reconciliation screen will include the transaction posted a day later than the statement date. No adjustments, no problems. 😀