Pending vs Processing - Moneylender Forums (2024)

Processing means the transaction instructions have been submitted to the ACH network to debit the funds from the borrower. Pending means the payment is scheduled but instructions to debit the borrower haven’t been submitted to the ACH network yet.

Each day at 4:30 I generate the day’s batch of transactions. At that time, any pending payments scheduled for two banking days in the future or earlier (for today [Friday 3/4/2022], this means all the payments pending for Tuesday 3/8 or earlier) are included in the day’s batch and sent to the ACH network. When I do that, those payments go from pending to processing. Once I have sent the debit instructions to the network, the transactions are out of our hands and can’t be stopped or changed.

The borrowers’ banks officially have one full banking day to decide what to do about the transaction – whether to honor it or to return it. So today’s batch will post on Tuesday, and the banks will have all day Wednesday to decide what to do. That means they have to notify my bank if a transaction is being returned by Thursday and I’ll receive a copy of that notice no later than Friday morning. On Friday, if a payment hasn’t been returned, it’s about 99% certain that there are no problems with it, and I release the funds to the lender in that day’s batch. The batch is always scheduled for two days in the future, so the credit of funds to the lender’s bank account happens on the following Tuesday.

Now that the ACH itself is performed by Actum Processing, there are a few new details.

First, you can see the history of events for each payment by logging into your account on the store and clicking AutoPay Payments. Processing payments will show the expected date when they should be released.

If you see "Payment submitted for processing with prenote." in the payment log on your Store page, that means this is the first payment on a newly entered bank account. "Prenote" is a required account verification step that adds four days to the processing timeline.

If the payment is scheduled in advance, AutoPay will begin processing the payment four days earlier so it hits the borrower's bank account on the desired day. If the first payment is scheduled for the next business day, people often begin to wonder if the payment "worked" because it takes like a week to hit the borrower bank account. It's working, it just takes extra time because of the verification step.