This article provides background information about real-time authorization (RTA) pending transactions. It also provides steps for managing your pending transactions.

The information in this article applies to U.S. Bank customers and Elan customers (both administrators and employees) who are using a physical U.S. Bank card.

A pending transaction is a transaction that has not yet been processed, or “posted” by a merchant.

For example, if you use your card to get gas, you may notice a pending transaction on your platform account for $1.00, even though you know you spent a total of $30.00.

The $1.00 pending transaction appears because the merchant hasn’t processed the $30.00 transaction yet. The $1.00 charge is like a placeholder until the merchant processes the transaction, and until then, the transaction retains that tentative, or pending, amount and status.

This may take some time (sometimes a few days) depending on the merchant.

Once the merchant processes the transaction, the transaction transitions from a pending transaction to a posted expense in the platform, and the full amount appears (like the $30.00 from the previous example).

To review your pending transactions from the web app, select “Expenses & Transactions” in the navigation menu.

When you have a pending or declined transaction, you receive a push notification on your mobile device. When you select the notification, it takes you directly to the Expenses & Transactions page (Figure 2) in the app.

On the Expenses & Transactions page for both web and mobile, pending transactions are in the top section, and posted expenses are in the bottom section. Both debit and credit transactions can show as pending. All of the transactions that appear on this page are transactions that you can take some action on, unlike declined transactions, which are for informational purposes only (refer to the “View declined transactions” article).

To access help text for the pending transactions, select the information icon by the Pending section heading.

Once the pending transaction gets posted, it moves to the general list, where you can find it by the transaction date. From there, you can add or edit information in additional fields and submit a report including that expense.

If after 30 days a pending transaction was never posted (for example, in the case of hotel incidental holds), the transaction is automatically removed from the Expenses & Transactions page.

To take action on a pending transaction:

Because pending transactions are tentative in nature, some actions that you might take on posted expenses are not available for pending transactions; the fields for these actions are grayed out. For instance, you cannot split, submit, or remove a pending transaction. (You can split and submit a transaction once it is posted.)

Other fields, such as the merchant, transaction amount, and date, are automatically filled for pending transactions. Once a transaction is posted, the amount updates with the final amount.

You are not required to take action on pending transactions, but adding details to a pending transaction speeds up the expense process. If you want to edit any transaction information at this point, you have the following options:

If you’ve completed these fields, once the pending transaction is posted the expense is complete and ready to be submitted.

Once a transaction is posted, you can update additional fields as needed, including the split expense information and assign to a report field. You can also now submit a report with that expense.

For assistance, use the online chat feature. On the web, select the question mark at the top-right corner of the page and then Chat with Us. On the mobile app, open the menu and then select Chat with Us.