US Bank Online Electronic Ledger Inaqurate Cloverdale Oregon

Your own check register is the only valid place to look and see what you have available. Online balances are merely a tool to assist in maintaining and balancing your register.

Let me give you an example of why this is so. When you use your debit card, the system sends in a hold request to the bank, and the banks sets aside that amount of money. When the actual debit hits the bank, they match it to the hold, delete the hold and debit your account. That's how it works in a perfect world.

In reality, often the actual debit does not match the hold. For instance, you use the card in a restaurant and they hold $25. When you sign, you add $5 for a tip, so the actual item that hits is $30. This is a problem because the original hold is never matched and would never drop off your account. There are many other examples of when this could be the case. To resolve this, all banks choose some period of time, usually 1 to 5 days, when an unmatched hold will just be deleted and your funds freed up.

Say your bank uses 3 days as the cutoff. (common) You use your card on Monday and a hold is placed. On Wednesday you look online and assume the item has been cleared, but in reality you are just seeing the hold. On Thursday the hold drops off and you balance increases, and you incorrectly think this is all available to you, so you spend it. Then, on Friday, the actual item arrives from the merchant and causes an overdraft because you spent that money twice.

The system isn't broken, it actually works very well. The problem arises when depositors assume that the balance they see online is their true available balance. In the same way that a bank could never know that today's balance does not reflect a check that you have written but hasn't been deposited yet, it also can never know if a merchant has submitted a batch of electronic debits for collection that will affect your account.

If you keep a register and your online balance does not match, you would be easily able to see which items in your register do not show online as pending or cleared, and they should be the amount of the difference in the two balances.