How Does Discover Report?

[andyaycw]

So Discover is very quick with updating the status of your account to the CRAs, however, do they update the account balance at every possible moment? I thought they reported the statement balance, and then left it like that until the next month.

I had a $19 statement balance for the month of September. I checked my credit reports and it showed the updated balance as $19. So I paid off my statement balance in full a day later.

So today, a week later, I pull my reports again and it shows a $0 balance. (I have not used the card ever since my last statement cut and I PIF.) Now I normally wouldn't be concerned about this, but wouldn't FICO think that this $0 balance means I never even used the account, and thus would deem it as an inactive account after several months?

I also looked at the Experian report, and the last green "OK" box is the exact same as before, showing my last "OK" as having been in August - the same as before and after my September statement cut, which leads me to believe that FICO is thinking I did nothing for the month of September, even though I left a balance to report on my statement date!

Has anyone else experienced this?

[haulingthescoreup]

The Discover CSR told me that they report to the bureaus every Friday. But I looked over various older credit reports, and the dates on which the bureaus posted seemed to be within a few days of the statement dates. So I dunno. It'll wear you out, won't it?!?

There are things reported by lenders that don't appear on our reports, apparently, and one of them is payment patterns. If so, there is a way in terms of scoring for FICO to know if a card is being used or sock-drawered. I read this on another post today or yesterday from someone who had seen a copy of the report that the lender gets, which seems to be a heckuva lot more intricate than our versions.

[andyaycw]

So how should one propose I deal with rotating my cards in and out?

If Discover reports once a month, then I already have that scenario dealt with.

What if they update every week though? Wouldn't my balance show up as $0 most of the time?

[haulingthescoreup]

One advantage of compulsively pulling frequent reports is that you can see what happens when. I have only seen Disc update once on mine, at that was right after the statement date.

J.Crew also told me that they report weekly, but I had just dug my account out of cold storage, put charges on it, paid most of it off, and waited for 5 weeks for it to start showing up. They may be reporting weekly, but the CRA's sure aren't doing anything with the extra data.

If you've got some reports lying around, spread them out and see if you can find a pattern to the post dates.