Activity on an inactive account - huh?

[JagerBombs89]

I was always under the impression that as long as I am making purchases on a card and making payments, my card status would always remain active.  Well this is the second time that I noticed an "active" card receive the following message: 

This e-mail is to notify you that the following changes have occurred on your credit file:

    activity on an inactive account

 Every month I make numerous purchases on my Amex card and PIF the balance before my statement cuts, thus generating a $0 balance.  Because of the federal holiday and shortened month, I didn't pay attention to my statement cut date and balance was reported to the bureaus.  Why is this generating "new activity" on a "dormant account" ??  I know when I pull my full credit reports I can see the amount of payments I made on every single account of mine. 

Is this negatively affecting my score by constantly PIF and letting a $0 balance report every month???

[lhcole77]

This recently happened to me as well. Even though we use our cards, if a $0 amount is reporting on CRs each month it will technically not be reporting activity.

[takeshi74]

Where is this message from?  As indicated above, reported balances of 0 may be seen as inactive by a CMS (i.e. consider the source).  Credit Karma generates similar messages for cards that previously reported a 0 balance.

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@JagerBombs89 wrote:

Is this negatively affecting my score by constantly PIF and letting a $0 balance report every month???

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The standard optimal utilization advice applies and without knowing the rest of your details it's difficult to say,

[Revelate]

Haha, so been playing around with Scorewatch and guess what popped up in my email just now:

"Recent Activity has been detected on an inactive account on your credit report"

This was on a Walmart card which hadn't reported since October (none or negative balance in my case) so I tossed a charge on there and let it report: it did, got said warning message, but made no difference to my score as it didn't materially change my utilization and didn't trip over a number of tradelines reporting a balance boundary.

Would be a more interesting test if a non-trivial tradeline to utillization was flagged for inactivity or re-activity to see if there was an exclusion on the tradeline from a scoring perspective as has been anecdotally reported here, but I thought the inactivity flag was much longer than 4 months.

[JagerBombs89]

I am subscribed to Scorewatch directly through Equifax and this is where the alert came from.  Now, with this balance reporting, I am at a 7% individual utilization and an overall utilization of around 2%.  Needless to say, my score dropped 5 points.

[09Lexie]

I got this email too on my Delta Amex. Funny thing is, the card has had a balance for two months