July 26, 2007
Fidelity Visa lets you know about temporary authorizations
My Citibank Premier Pass Elite Mastercard takes days to post transactions. If I buy something on a Monday, it’ll typically show up on the website on Wednesday or Thursday.
On the other hand, my Fidelity Visa card actually posts temporary authorizations on to the website. Temporary authorizations are the charges that vendors put on your card to make sure transaction will go through. Typically it’s the full amount, but sometimes it’s just $1 for quick verification purposes – and then the full amount later.
In this example, I had just been to Roll Bowl 2 hours ago, and already the charge appeared. Pretty neat!
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3 Comments to “Fidelity Visa lets you know about temporary authorizations”
July 26th, 2007 at 8:10 am
This is really a fantastic customer service — I hate going to my bank website and seeing the current balance and the “available” balance at odds, with no notation of what credit card charges are pending, temporary or otherwise. Kudos to Fidelity!
July 26th, 2007 at 8:11 am
By the way…
Margaret’s bakery? Can we say “wedding cake?”
July 26th, 2007 at 9:24 am
Every now and then my credit card company calls me up because they suspect fraudulent use. They read me a list recent transactions, and I have to tell them if it was me or not. Turns out that they have all been legitimate transactions. But last year they blew me away by asking about a $9 purchase I’d made less than 20 minutes earlier.
Seeing the temp charges can be useful. One of the most common mistakes I see in my bills is when a restaurant fails to reverse the temp charge (when you first present the card) after entering the final charge (after you add in the tip). In one case, I had an unreversed temp charge post on the last day of the billing cycle and the final charge post on the first day of the next cycle. I would have missed that without Quicken.
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