Apple Card statement shows wrong numbers

A follow-up to the follow-up.

The merged-account transactions not showing up on all account owners' Apple IDs bug is fixed. I checked my Wallet app on the phone for the account that it was not working and at some point the transactions showed up properly.

The statement for August arrived today. The balance due is the sum of the month's revolving charges plus the month's installments. I did not pay the installments for the July bill as they were "graced," and no interest was charged or anything, as expected. But! The remaining balance for the installments is calculated as if those payments were made. I opened chat with a Goldman Sachs person and asked what is going on, and I was told that all installments were just delayed one month, so for example an installment that was scheduled to end in September will now end in October. The bill does not indicate this -- in fact is says that the September installment is the last for that purchase. The bill doesn't indicate at all that those installments were graced.

Of course my accounting ledger is screwed up. There are entries for the July 31 installments due August 31, which were graced. The fix is to delete those entries and fix the balance for the July 31 bill to reflect that. But the point of reconciliation is that the ledger matches the statements, and the statements are just wrong.

So this is completely ridiculous and unusable.

PLEASE, re-read what I wrote.

YES, the minimum payment is correct. It's $25 plus the installments. And paying the minimum assures the account is current, but of course you will incur interest on the month's charges minus $25. This is not my issue.

My issue is that the statement says "Your July balance as of Jul 31, 2021 is $400" and "This includes any Apple Card Monthly Installments as of Jul 31, 2021." $400 is purchases I charged to the card in the month, and it does not include the $200 installments. How do I know this? I added up my purchases and they total $400. And the statement on page 2, under "Transactions," says "total charges, credits and returns for this period" is $400.

The actual total balance for July should be those purchases ($400) plus the installments ($200) for a total of $600.

Indeed the iOS app says that all I need to pay by 31 August is $400 and no interest will be charged.

But: if I pay only $400, what will happen is that $200 of that payment will be applied to the installments, and the remaining $200 will be applied to the current purchases. The balance after the payment will be $200, and I will be charged interested on that $200.

muguy wrote:

Your installment payments are likely automatic and zero interest. So, it is correct that your card balance of $400, if paid off, will no longe accrue interest. Unless I'm not understanding what you're trying to say.

You do not understand.

The statement balance should be the purchases plus the installment -- it says so right under the number! -- but the amount is actually just the purchases.

So if I pay the statement balance, the bank will apply part of payment to the installment, and the remained to the purchases. Since the statement balance is wrong, if I paid it, I will underpay what is owed and actually be charged interest on the difference.

One more thing, as Jobs would say.

I am looking at my June 30, 2021 bill, and it is correct. The June Balance is correctly the sum of the charges for purchases during June plus that month's installment charges.

muguy wrote:

The only thing I suspect, as I've seen it myself when downloading transactions, is that the statement end date isn't capturing everything through the end date. If I download my transactions into quicken, it's off by one full day compared to the statement. Not sure why...

Since Apple and GS refuse to implement any way to download current transactions (instead of just the end of month list), I have never noticed that their downloads are off by a day.

One thing that is common to every bank, though, is that the date of purchase is often a day or two before the date of the transaction. While the transaction might appear immediately in your (non-Apple) bank's website/app, it often shows as "pending," until it actually clears. This is very common for restaurants and bars which still (for god-knows why, it's so insecure!) let the customer write the tip amount on the receipt. You'll see a pending charge for the base amount, and at some point the merchant's accountant manually enters the tip into the transaction and then you see the full charge.

"If you’re seeing something different, please reach out to the Goldman Sachs support team for further assistance."

I did, and after going back and forth for over an hour and being bounced to different people, this discrepancy was finally recognized as an actual bug, a ticket was opened, and they expect to fix it as soon as they can. This is one heckuva regression that should have been caught in testing.

This is the second of two bugs for the Apple Card system that I've documented and submitted to Apple and GS for squashing.

A follow-up, because it's good to bring these things to a conclusion.

An Apple Card team representative actually called me about this.

He said that they realized that there were issues with merged accounts and installments on the original accounts. What they chose to do is to indicate the merged-account balance as the total of all purchases made on all of the cards in the month. This is the revolving charge balance. And there is a grace period until October (!) for the installments.

This means that if you pay the stated balance, you are paying the revolving charge in full and no interest will accrue. If any extra is paid, it goes to the oldest of the installments first. Certainly all of the installments you expected can be paid and they will be credited correctly. But if you don't pay any more than the stated balance, nothing gets applied to the installments but that's OK, as payments to them have a new grace period. I told the support guy "that's nice, but you really need to make this absolutely clear on your statements and on the customer Apple Card website and on the app."

This grace period therefore explains why the Wallet app will show the amount to pay without getting interest charges is only the revolving balance.

I did not ask about whether under normal circumstances would a payment first go to installment and then to the revolving because I don't care -- I pay statements in full every month.

If anyone else is in this situation -- merged accounts with installments and the statement balance showing only revolving charges -- and they are not clear on exactly how much they must pay to avoid interest or penalties they should contact the Apple Card support and ask.

My second issue, which was transactions on the merged account showing up only on one of the account owner's Apple ID, was acknowledged as a bug and should be fixed by the end of this month.