Pending Transactions
A pending transaction is one your bank has authorised but not yet finalised. It typically appears right after a purchase and clears (posts) a few days later once the merchant settles the charge.
Lunch Flow can sync pending transactions, but this is off by default because of the duplicate risk described below.
Enabling pending transaction sync can create duplicate entries in your destination app. Leave it disabled unless you understand and accept the tradeoff described below.
Why pending sync can cause duplicates
When a pending transaction clears, banks or providers sometimes assign it a completely different identifier. Rather than updating the existing record, the cleared transaction can arrive as a brand new entry. In some cases the amount, date, or description may also change between the pending and posted versions.
Most destination apps deduplicate by transaction ID, so they have no way to know these two records are the same purchase. The result is two entries for one transaction:
- One from when it was pending
- One from when it cleared
Pending transactions can also disappear entirely before posting, which can leave orphaned entries that never resolve.
Enabling pending sync
Pending sync is off by default. You can opt in through:
- Destination settings: Some destinations like Lunch Money have a Sync pending transactions toggle in the connection settings.
- API: Use the
include_pending=truequery parameter when fetching transactions. - actual-flow: Set
"includePending": truein your config when syncing to Actual Budget.
To turn it back off, disable the toggle in your destination settings or remove the include_pending parameter from your API calls.
What we are improving
We are actively working on better handling for pending transactions, including matching a pending entry to its posted version so it updates in place instead of duplicating. This is genuinely difficult because of the many edge cases: IDs change, amounts shift, dates move, and some pending transactions vanish without ever posting. Behaviour also varies across banks and providers.
Until that handling is reliable, we recommend keeping pending sync disabled.
FAQ
How is this guide?