Temporary pending transactions stay in Simplifi even if never cleared

jbrian00

I have some credit card accounts linked to Simplifi. Some credit card companies, US Bank for example, will create a transaction for a pending authorization and will preface it with “Auth:”. Then, when the transaction clears, a brand new transaction is created without the word Auth. In Simplifi, the pending Auth transaction will sync, followed eventually by the separate cleared non-Auth transaction, but even after the pending Auth transaction disappears from US Bank’s side, it remains in Simplifi, leaving both transactions and requires manual deletion and if it is a PayPal transaction, making sure the transfer of money is correct. Coming from Mint, I noticed that Mint has intelligence built in to remove these pending transactions if they fall off of the bank’s end which alleviates this problem. I noticed that a charge at Chase recently created 2 transactions from the Chase side, one charge is an authorization showing $0, the other showing the proper transaction amount. Is Simplifi supposed to remove pending transactions that don’t actually clear on the bank’s end?

Coach Natalie

@jbrian00, thanks for posting!

Quicken Simplifi is designed to not remove data, which is most likely what you're seeing. If a pending transaction downloads, Simplifi is designed to match it to the cleared one once it downloads, but it wouldn't actually remove data from "unmatched" transactions, such as an authorization charge that falls off on the bank's end.

If Mint has some logic built-in surrounding this ability, I'd say that it's definitely possible in Quicken Simplifi too. I'd suggest creating an Idea post to outline how this works in Mint and what you'd expect to see in Quicken Simplifi so other users can vote on it and our product team can review it. Otherwise, we typically suggest just deleting these types of transactions.

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/998/creating-and-voting-for-ideas-in-the-community

I hope this helps!

-Coach Natalie

RobWilk

It sounds like this is a financial-institution specific error. Pending transaction names are prepended with 'auth', but when cleared they're named differently (and come up as a new transaction, since they have a different name), so they don't match, and pending transactions never clear DESPITE the fact that they did clear.

This is different than authorizations (like hotel credit card holds) which never clear because there were no charges.