What do you all think of this banking issue

Is there not some kind of time limit for charges?

I think there should be.

If they didn't notice hundreds of transactions, I don't think it is fair to expect people to notice one transaction that didn't go through. Many people live paycheck to paycheck and I can see how they would be mad about charges going through a year later. They should have at least let people know before the charges went through.

Myshelly is correct, there SHOULD be a limit. Here is one I found, I'll look at our work to see if I can find out what ours is.

"5. BALANCING YOUR TERMINAL DAILY
Credit card terminal balancing should be done on a daily basis. You must compare the amount and number of sales slips to the total number provided by the terminal audit trail. In addition, you should then balance your audit trail against the host total. Failure to follow these balancing procedures may result in lost sales. Refer to your terminal Reference Guide for detailed instructions."

If a merchant doesn't process timely, they could lose the right to collect.

Where were all the, or even one, honest people/person who called the pumpkin patch and alerted them that the charge hadn't gone through? if someone did alert them why didn't they look into it then? And if someone did, why aren't they coming forward now to say so as if that were the case, the pumpkin patch knew about it back then and shouldn't be charging now.

As a small business owner how on earth did they miss this? You can't even balance your cash register Income against your bank deposits? you deserve to lose the money.

I'm sorry but whining about overdraft fees is ridiculous. Whether debit card or writing a check, a person with a brain would deduct the payment from their balance. Hence, the money is gone and your balance reflects that. 

If these people balanced their checking account they would have noticed the transaction never posted and would not have incurred any overdraft fees.

Anyone who does not regularly balance their checking account TO THE PENNY will never get any sympathy from me.

I am also someone who reconciles their bank account monthly and would have definitely noticed a charge not coming through, I might have gave it another month because I have had transactions for whatever reason take longer than I think they should, but after the 2nd month of the charge not showing, I would have called the merchant.

Sounds like some people were hoping to get something for free or they don't watch their bank accounts very closely.

Checks only have a 1 year period to be used so I would think the same as debits\credits.

What's to stop them from saying 6 years down the road that debits didn't go through. There should be an expiration to be able to collect.

Any charges to my checking account are tracked and I would have noticed, but I use a cc 99.9% of the time. I check charges every few days- a week at the most to see if they are legitimate allocate them into the appropriate budget category. As I use my cc for everything, there's a lot of transactions. I seriously doubt I'd notice the pumpkin patch failed to charge me - but I sure would notice a new charge from a business I didn't use in over a year. I don't know if I'd immediately cancel the card- more likely I would contest until I figured it out, but if I would have - especially if I feared it'd be compromised, I'd be annoyed as hell. I have a ton of auto charges.

Ugh, what a mess that sounds like!  So this small business is just now noticing a problem from 2015 and it's causing problems for a lot of people...  My concern for them would be their reputation coming out the other side of it. 

From a customer standpoint - i'd be annoyed if my account was overdrawn because of it.  I myself keep a cushion in my account because I do not keep track of things that well.  I do balance my account every month or so, but honestly sometimes I write thing in from the statement.  I wouldn't necessarily remember every purchase.

From a small business standpoint - how the heck does that happen?  I keep track of our business account and make sure I know what is going on there.  And we've had contractors not pay or not pay in a timely manner...sometimes you have to weigh your options on whether it's worth pursuing.  I'm not sure how much the amount of money was, but I wonder since they didn't miss it whether it's worth all the negativity going on right now. 

I'm impressed that people are still using the same card as last year. I think that was 3 credit card numbers ago for me.

  I have an item that has never came through. It's been over 2 years and I think I know why. However, I still keep that amount as deducted from the balance, because weird things happen.

I went to an indoor play place and kept a register of the charge (it was pending on my account immediately after the card swipe). We had gone a few times that month but I noticed at one point that my bank balance was continually off by one of the visits. I left it as a charge on my account for about 3 months (just in case they figured out the discrepancy and pushed the charge through) before just deleting it to make my bank balance again. I've never seen a random charge to make up for it down the line...it's been 2 or 3 years now. At the time, we only had 1 kid we paid for (so it was just $10) and it's been a while since that's been the case (we have 3 we have to pay for now).

It wasn't a seasonal business, though...had I cared enough to do it, I could have easily called and said 'hey, one of the charges for a visit I made were pending on my account and now they aren't...how would you like me to handle this?' For a pop up business, how the hell are you supposed to do that? If the charge isn't there, after a few months, I would remove it and consider it a loss on their end because there is no way to contact them and inform them of the mishap. A year later, I would definitely NOT expect there to be a charge and would figure the business wrote it off as a loss because it was their error.

Then again, I've gotten 30-40 page billing statements from my pediatrician's office with bills from every visit we've ever had about 18 months after my first was born. Apparently, they didn't have a good billing department and were getting caught up...and in the 30-40 pages, they actually owed us over $40 back. When I asked for them to send a check as a refund or to apply it to my other child's account where I had to pay $10 co-pays more frequently at the time, they said they couldn't do that and about a year later, I got a bill for $10 in the mail for child with the credit and because of the time it had been since I owed anything, they had deleted the credit...they had to do some digging to find it, to fix it and then told me that whoever said they couldn't refund it and couldn't apply it to another child's account was wrong on both counts...they ended up applying the appropriate credit and then sending me a check for the remainder that they owed me. In this case, there is a contract you sign when you go into the office stating that anything they bill you that insurance doesn't pay for, you have to pay, so they have that in writing to use against you.

I also have a savings account that always has $5 in it (I don't use it all that often but I keep it open JUST in case I want to use it to earmark money for a trip or something away from our other accounts, but in order to keep it active for free, I have to have an automatic transfer every month...there used to be a fee for more than 3 transfers OUT of the account each month, but anything under that was free and the charge was automatically reversed) . One month, the service fee wasn't reversed immediately like it had always been in the past. I called, they issued the refund and the automatic refund processed a few days later. I've never taken the $5 out in case they ever reconcile the accounts and realize they shouldn't have given me that $5 (that's been about 8 years now).