Very delayed payments

Byrde05

Hi,
I'm not sure if I've categorised this correctly sorry.
I've made purchases recently with a retailer/company (one of which I make a few purchases with). On a couple of occasions now, the payment has disappeared from my pending and the money has gone back in to my bank and then around 7-10 days later the money is taken and appears on my transactions.
This has caused issues with me keeping track of my balance etc. I've contacted my bank yesterday as I had lost track and wasn't sure if my 'balance after pending' was correct however, they advised it was correct and even the advisor could not see this mysterious transaction which ended up coming out suddenly later that day. 
My main question is, is this common for this to happen? The retailer in question has advised they've had recent IT updates which could be the reason why but I have noticed this happen on different occasions and I'm worried that I will forget about one of them and there won't be enough available funds because of the prolonged delay. What would happen in this scenario?

Any advice or help would be appreciated - thanks.

eskbanker

Byrde05 said:

My main question is, is this common for this to happen? The retailer in question has advised they've had recent IT updates which could be the reason why but I have noticed this happen on different occasions and I'm worried that I will forget about one of them and there won't be enough available funds because of the prolonged delay. What would happen in this scenario?

What would happen is that you'd go overdrawn, incurring charges for doing so - it's becoming less frequent but has always been the case that merchants can take a long time to process payments through to settlement, sometimes weeks or even months, so it's never safe to rely on your bank knowing what your balance will be after all outstanding authorisations are fulfilled (or cancelled), i.e. if it's important to you to track at this level of detail then you need to do it yourself.

colsten

Which bank does this happen with? Is it a VISA or Mastercard? 

Have you considered using a credit card (fully paid off each month) instead of a debit card?

Have you considered one of the free personal finance apps to record your purchases as you make them? Or use a Curve-fronted debit card - I believe even the free version of Curve keeps an automatic record of your spend, even if the underlying debit or credit card has transactions temporarily disappearing?

Byrde05

Thanks for the advice - both very helpful. It's a debit card used. The problem is, the payments initially went in to pending which reflects a true balance but at some stage, I think maybe the following day they disappear and go back on to my balance. The trouble is, when it's small transactions and a few of them it's hard to keep track but I guess if merchants can take as long as they like then there's no way around this other than to keep separate tabs.

KxMx

I do a monthly spending diary spreadsheet and a hard backed notebook just for my bank account.
So at the moment I've been able to tell the discrepancy between online banking and notebook is that Subway haven't yet taken payment from a purchase a month ago.
I use the notebook figure as the true balance because as soon as I use debit card etc it gets deducted.