Downloaded date on the account register

When you manually or automatically download an OFX (Article 235) statement for Microsoft Money into an account, the date which that statement is downloaded is displayed in the top right hand corner of the account register. This can be seen in the image below:

In this part of the account register, it will also tell you the bank's (or financial institution's) balance. Note that this may not be the same as yours, as it depends on cleared funds at the bank.

One thing to notice is that the time is part the OFX file that you download, and so may not be the time you expect. The time depends on what the financial insitution decides to do in the OFX file - some will use a time when the bank is shut (e.g. midnight) and transactions cleared. Occasionally banks aren't too careful on how they provide the time, and so they may use the wrong timezone, say EST instead of GMT - which consequently makes times appear in the future!!

It is nothing to worry about though - one of those things that unfortunately we have to live with.

Ian Bartholomew, in the UK Money newsgroup cited an example, with the EST case above:

For example, the ofx file download from Bank name removed always has the correct local time but also includes a timezone figure of -5, the US east coast timezone. Money will, correctly, calculate and display the time as 5 hours after the local time. For example, I just (at 19:14) downloaded my account and the ofx file includes the line ...

20060215191407[-5:EST]

Reading from left to right you get 2006 02 15 (the date) 19 14 07 (the time) and -5 (the timezone). If I import the download into Money it, correctly as far as it concerned, gives the download time as 16/2/2006 at 00:14.

This article might only be relevant for particular regional versions of Microsoft Money. If you download statements directly using 2-way OFX, this problem might not occur.