I noticed that for an account A, the lastTransactionDate is the date such that all transactions happen before that are available through getAccountTransactions. It's NOT the date such that ONLY all transactions happen before that are taken into account when calculating the balance of account A because some transactions happen after lastTransactionDate have to be taken into account to yield the correct balance. Can someone confirm my observation?
Another thing is that some transactions that happen on the same date as balanceDate with the exact time being AFTER the time of balanceDate are taken into account as well to yield the account's balance. For example, balanceAmount = 7682.16, balanceDate = 2013-08-06 12:53:21 - 07:00 but the transaction with postedDate = 2013-08-06 16:49:41 - 07:00 is included. Does this mean we should only care about the date portion of balanceDate? and that balanceDate of 2013-08-06 12:53:21 - 07:00 includes all transactions posted on 2013-08-06?
The LastTransactionsDate is the date of the last captured transaction in our system. The balance of the account is what we captured from the FI's website so we perform no calculation of the transactions to come up with that number. If there are pending transactions and the FI provides their balance in that fashion we will provide that value.
The BalanceDate field refers to when our system captured the balance of the account from the website. So that balance would include all the transactions posted on the website at that time and if the account is including the pending transactions you would need to include those as well to match the balance appropriately.