This post precisely describes the reason I am unable to use Quicken Online. I am very meticulous about my budgeting (I deploy frequently so I have to be). I have the upcoming transactions section completely setup and running smoothly for all of my bills.

Today my bank tells Quicken Online that my balance is $2443. Quicken then takes $2443, subtracts all of my input upcoming transactions prior to my next pay check and calculates my real balance. Here's where the problem starts.

USAA includes pending transactions in that balance that Quicken downloads and uses for the baseline for my "real balance." Unfortunately ~$350 of my upcoming transactions are pending on the USAA side of the process. Quicken doesn't show me that they are pending and it subtracts them from the bank supplied balance to give me my "real balance." I now have a real balance that is $350 less than reality.

This makes Quicken Online useless for daily money management. If I can't manage my budget as well as daily spending in one place, why would I use this program?

I'm going back to my old software. Hopefully Quicken will correct this because I was enjoying the utility of using my iPhone as well as a browser to manage my money anywhere in the world. If only the program was actually useable.

They have accepted my suggestion so that is step one of getting this fixed. Lets hope they choose to do something about this and do it soon, because this IS the biggest thorn in the side of this tool. I believe the Quicken Online team sees the issue and know they have to do something about it, lets just hope it does not take more than a year like the budgeting request did. If you also agree with this post please chime in, the more the better.

Replies to this message

andyhostetter (Sep 25, 2009 8:55 am)

toadgold (Mar 14, 2010 7:28 am)

This is an absolute must have. If I can view pending transactions in online banking with the institution where my account is held, I need to be able to see them here as well. If I have to go to each of my banks to tally up pending transactions so that I have a complete picture of my finances at a given instant, that's silly. I suppose I could manually enter transactions and reconcile later, but that's a lot of work too. If I spend a lot on Friday and I need to know where I stand in terms of budgeting before I go out with my friends on Saturday, Quicken isn't going to help we with that the way it is right now.

I agree! Until I figured this issue out, I ended up overdrawing the account. (The pending transactions included deposits!) I now have to balance my account by bringing both intuit and my bank up at the same time, and changing the "uncleared" / pending items to "0" and adding the amount back into the Payee section. A lot of work! Pleeeease add a "pending" section!

This is a huge problem for me as well. I use BOA and they including pending transactions in the account balance. Now that I understand the issue, instead of simply being able to use Quicken to manage my balance, I have to use both BOA and Quicken. I also have to monitor pending transactions and manually remove duplicates from Quicken on a daily basis. This is a huge hassle, especially considering the tool is supposed to make managing your money easier.

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kfraj5792109 (Oct 21, 2009 12:54 am)

I've used this quicken online for nearly two weeks now, and have quickly discovered that the pending transactions issue is a major product flaw. It's difficult to believe that Intuit would develop a banking product which reports such non-intuitive balances. Actually, it’s even more difficult to believe that you once had to pay for its use. For someone who works in IT (as a developer, application analyst, business analyst and project manager) I can only conclude that Intuit decided to forgo the downloading of pending transactions and accepted the deceptive reporting of balances due to lacking standards and/or major inconsistencies of reporting pending transactions within the banking industry. However, when I ask the question, “Does Intuit have a work around for this issue with its paid products?” The answer is an astounding YES as you might suspect. Where does this leave us? Well, the moral to this story is simply that you get what you pay for. This free product is not a comprehensive banking tool designed to satisfy the meticulous banking customer. I suspect that it was designed with some intent to woo the banking enthusiast to Intuit’s more sophisticated, paid banking products. More so, one can suspect that this free online product serves as a great market research tool to better decipher just what one is willing to pay for,...but I digress. In other words, I’m quite curious to see when Intuit decides to incorporate the downloading of pending transactions into this free online banking tool. If it’s soon, I just wasted money on purchasing Quicken Deluxe.

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chickgl (Oct 21, 2009 3:57 am)

It sounds like you haven't done your homework as an "IT" guy. Did you ask your bank why it does not give Quicken the pending transactions or are you ASSUMING that it's Intuit's fault?
You will find out that Quicken only gives you what they get from the bank. You will also find out that you will have the same issue with Quicken Premier or any other desktop version. With a little more work, you will find out that not all banks are equal.

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marksanctuary (Oct 21, 2009 11:54 am)

marksanctuary (Oct 21, 2009 11:55 am)

FYI: The Quicken Online support person confirmed it as a known issue that has gotten lots of incident reports and that they are committed to finding a solution but it may take some time. Back when I submitted the request I actually discussed it with the support person a bit and this is what I found out. The scripts that they use to do the parsing of the data are logging into our accounts just as we do personally. They crawl the webpages and slurp up the data then process it for Quicken. So in the end they can collect the data just the same as we could when we login to our financial sites.

Is it possible to also have pending transactions somehow shown in the trends section. Perhaps they wouldn't be the same color as the actual cleared transactions. I would like those transactions I manually enter in the upcoming transactions (where the date has passed and the transaction is now in limbo somewhere) to appear in my trends/goals. Right now to make the goals and trends useful, I have to go back and see which transactions quicken has included and then add those which are pending to figure out my "real balance" for each spending category.

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rossshehy (Feb 3, 2010 8:39 am)

OMG it took me FOREVER to figure out what was going wrong, but this is my issue as well. My Quicken Online balance is the same as my bank's balance, only my bank includes PENDING transactions in the balance and quicken does not. Wouldn't it be simple for Quicken to simply NOT include PENDING transactions in the balance??? That would be the most preferred method for me... I can't believe this is not fixed yet! Do I need to send an email to a support person so they have a sense of how many of us are affected? Honestly, i bet there are lots of folks who are having this trouble and didn't realize what was causing it. Like I said, it took me a long time to figure this one out. Sometimes my bank backs up as many as 20-30 pending transactions!!

Same issue here. I really don't want to go back to another checkbook software. I like Quicken Online, but doing this mental math is getting old. It does kind of defeat the purpose of having a computer do it for me. =(

I'm a new user to Quicken and after setting up my accounts, I thought I was doing something wrong so this was good information. Thank you

Do you know if it is possible to manually add the few pending transactions and then reconcile them later? If I have to live with the quicken balance being a few days behind so be it but if I can add the line items as needed, I would like that. I'm concerned about double counting (my manual entry and then 3 days later the real cleared transaction).