Originally Posted by jackal

Yeah, the BOA cards (and a couple other banks--MBNA pre-BOA used to, too) show "pending" charges--these are the authorizations. They're converted into charges when the batch is submitted by the merchant and BOA receives and processes the debits. As you said, hotel/car rental charges remain pending longer because they are not submitted in the batch until the end of the stay/rental--the charge is marked "authorization only" and is converted to a payment by the system upon check-out/return. It's a perfect illustration of how the system works.

I'm surprised your BOA stuff is processed that quickly--when I was more actively using my AS BOA card, I seemed to notice it taking more like two or three days, but I haven't been using that card much lately and haven't been watching. Maybe BOA processes ACH transactions more often than other banks and/or posts it to the customers accounts as soon as they receive the ACH data, whereas other banks might wait until the actual funds transfers are completely settled and finalized before posting the charge to the account.