Fidelity: Keep my balances accurate! Part 2

Sigh. Looks like I’ve managed to confuse the folks over at Fidelity. They responded to Tuesday’s email, saying

When a bill is paid with a check (which your bill for $223.85 was), the amount will not be deducted from your account history until the check is paid, so that is why you see it in the billpay “Recent Payments” and not the “Recent History” in your mySmart Cash account.

If you take your current available to withdraw balance ($322.98) and subtract the uncleared check $223.85, you get $99.13, which is $.03 off from your expected total of $99.10. The extra $.03 is from your interest payment on January 30, 2009.

Totally reasonable, makes perfect sense.

Except….

It doesn’t quite match with what the Bill Pay system says:

<Vendor> received your payment electronically on 02/24/2009. Your payment was posted to your <vendor> account on 02/24/2009

Additionally, when I check my <Vendor>  statement online, it says:

$223.85 – paid on 2/24/2009

Clearly there is a disconnect here. So I called up Fidelity, explained the situation, and got transfered to a very nice Bill Pay specialist named Amber. After going through my account, and putting me on hold a few times, Amber came back and basically said

I’m sorry, I don’t know why it’s not showing up.

Awesome.

It appears that one Fidelity system shows the bill was “paid electronically”; another system shows it was “paid by check”, which won’t show up as a debit on my account until that check is “cashed”.

I logged into my vendor’s website, which, of course, shows the account as “paid on 2/24/2009”

Bill is shown as paid in statement; Fidelity isnt sure.

Amber asked me to check again tomorrow or Friday, as it may take time as “it’s making its way through the system” (even though another bill, paid on the same day, shows up correctly).

The saga continues. Ain’t technology grand?