Every one I use, which is about ten now, has the same modus operandi, the charges will be visible immediately on the available balance, but will take three days to show on the current activity. And so when I pay a credit card be e-deduction from my bank, with a weekend of dead air added into the mix, from start to finish it will take a full seven days. So for seven days one or the other account is wrong. And always wrong not in my favor, that is showing money gone from one place and not arriving at the next.
The bank alone is very odd, because they will show something pending up to two days after it happened and it can be pending four days. And for the period none of the balances they display are balanced. Seems like the first rule of running a checkbook balance card is never to let that happen.
Of course they are quite harsh if you do the parallel operation, writing a check on money you’ve just deposited, figuring they will both clear together. Nope, that’s a crime against the banking system. They own the float.
For #2, do they have a “total balance” and “available balance” or similar totals?
For #3, my bank is supposed to add credits before debits (although I’ve never been in a situation where it mattered). Is yours different? Is the deposit/debit date the same on the website. Transactions conducted later in the day (after 4pm or so) can be pushed over to the next business day.
Are you talking about payments to your credit card or do you expect the online account to be in synch with your activity.
In otherwords are you saying if your account is at $100 and you charge $25 at Walmart that by the time you get home and look your credit card should be $125 online?
Processing credit cards are handled differently by different banks. And it depends on which bank the merchant uses. BoA is by the quickest and most modern bank in terms of e-transactions.
But online activity is kind of like your iPod, it doesn’t synch up immediately. It usually synchs up at a given time. Generally after midnight some time is the most common synch time.
Different merchants use different methods of charging, for instance, in a store they charge the card immediately and it shows on your credit card activity as “charged.” When ever the synch times comes this will be billed and interest, if any, applies from that time.
Places like hotels and car rentals, don’t actually charge your card till you leave. What they do is authorize it. These authorizatins are good for one week or till check out whichever comes first. So if you go into a hotel and they swipe your card the hotel has a system which it figures out what you probably will spend. Then they authorize that card. So lets say you stay at the Westin for 3 days and the hotel thinks at check out your bill will be $500.00. They authorize it and the bank holds $500 of your credit limit for this charge. When you check out if the bill is only $400, the extra $100 authorization is released when the hotel changes the status of the authorization to “sold.” In hotels this always occurs after midnight but sometimes as late at 5am.
If you’re paying credit cards online be very careful 'cause some companies now don’t consider Friday a business day at all. I hate BoA 'cause it will tell you the due date is on a Sunday but the last day to pay is the Friday before it, so if your due date is September 6th (Sunday), Friday September 4th is the latest you can pay actually
BTW just so you understand a merchant ID is the seller and if they combine the charges will come faster.
For instance, if I stay at a Westin Hotel and that Westin uses Bank of America to process its credit card transactions, and I also use a BoA MasterCard the process time will be faster.
But each merchant can choose any bank they want to process their credit cards. So you can have a Chase Visa processed by a Sheraton that uses Wells Fargo to process credit cards.
If the question is to me, payments by me are fine. Schedule them and they get done.
It’s charges on the card – recently, AFAICT, it hasn’t mattered what store it is, on-line or in real life, or whatever. It seems like it takes three business days, minimum, for a charge to actually show on my statement (although, without fail, it shows as “pending” the next day). Again, what’s weird is that this just started recently.
And no, that’s not hotels or anything or like that (that authorize but don’t actually make the charge). Just regular businesses – grocery stores, gas stations, etc. Now that it’s become more prominent in my mind, I’ll start paying better attention to see if it correlates with a particular store (or stores).
After looking at my accounts this morning, it occurred to me that the above isn’t clear – sorry. What’s changed recently for the one card is that charges marked “pending” are now grouped together under a single heading and only on a summary page. They used to have them also listed individually on the statement, where it now takes days before they show.
The other card has both – on the statement, charges have a “transaction posted date” column; pending charges are marked as such, while others have a date filled in. And, having just checked it again, it shows items I just bought within the past two hours as pending.