divemistressofthedark

Hey folks, I called CS three separate times today (including the online services division) trying to get to the bottom of what's laid waste to my accounting for the year.

1.) Sometime this week, Amex' system randomly selected four of the transactions from on my January statement and reassigned them to December - immediately throwing off my running totals in Quicken for that account for the year and un-reconciling it. I can account for this by inserting fake transactions and adjusting my totals for the month, but why on earth would they wait two months to do it, and why those four transactions? (The xactions in question appear on the hard copy of my January statement and have been present when viewing transactions online for that month until this week.)

I'm going to be really irritated if they do this again later in the year, when it's going to be much more difficult to locate and adjust discrepancies (I had to go through all my charges on that account line by line to find the errors, a tedious, time-consuming task, which will be significantly more cumbersome when there are hundreds more transactions.)

The only reason I can dream up is my change from Platinum to PR Gold status, which may have triggered some strangenesses on their end.

2.) My records don't agree with Amex's list of transactions for the year. I went to 'view my account,' 'recent activity', then selected 'current year' to see the transactions since 1/1/10. (I've also downloaded them in .qfx format for import into Quicken.) I've gone through every transaction on my end - multiple times - and Amex' numbers are still about $60 off, in their favor.

What's really frustrating is NONE of the CS reps had the slightest clue even what I was talking about, repeatedly telling me things like "transactions from the prior month will be on the current month's statement" and "payments every month will apply toward charges from the prior month." Oh, really? Needless to say none of them had much useful advice on how to fix this. The only remotely helpful suggestion was to try to dispute a charge (but I don't know how I'd do even that, since this appears to be a math error, not a fraudulent charge.)

I think I'll wait until my paper statement cuts for the month and then double check against that. Anybody have any suggestions, other than calling Exec Office? It's really going to be a problem for me if Amex' system and online tools aren't going to be reliable, or at least predictably unreliable.

mia

Perhaps you could download the same data in Excel format to test the artithmetic and to see if the total matches your records or their records?

divemistressofthedark

Well, Quicken is supposed to do that, although admittedly I'm not completely in love with their program for the Macintosh - which is significantly less powerful than the Windows version. It surely couldn't hurt to try another program and see what it comes up with - I'll try that.

Will also report back on what ultimately happens on this. I know I can't be the only person who's interested in keeping good records or relying on the online tools to maintain them. (The sales tax in my state is nearly 10%, and I track every penny to be sure I write off all I'm entitled to on my Federal returns...^)

ETA: Well, after checking against my paper statements, I'm still somewhat confused as to what exactly happened - in addition to the date reassignments, I had a mystery credit to my bill in February, and an undercharge in January. However, the discrepancy on paper is only about $10 - and I'd much rather write off that amount than go through 800-number hell trying to get to the bottom of the accounting errors. Think I'll stick strictly to paper reconciliation for the next few months - and have kept a bunch of running notes in my file.

My online information is still about $300 off - transactions appear in my online list as having occurred in February, and yet are not on my statement. Too bad, since I had pretty well worked out a system to reconcile my account using Amex' .qfx downloads.

Also, my Surpass account features charges that appear on the statement for February and yet are not included in the total due for the month. It's crazy-making. Not happy I'm going to have to really watch these statements for a while...or with the seemingly random way these charges are accounted for.