Add Ability to Match One Downloaded Trans to Multiple Trans in Quicken Mac (23 Legacy/Merged Votes)

smayer97

As per the description in this post: https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/how-to-match-one-downloaded-bank-transaction-to-...

BUT don't stop at the way if works in QWin...instead take it to the next level as it is done in MS Money, as described in the follow-on comment here: https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/how-to-match-one-downloaded-bank-transaction-to-... so as to preserve the original Payee info in the registers.

If implemented like MS Money, this would be a boon and save time, e.g., instead of doing multiple individual deposits at the bank, like rent checks, it would be possible to perform a single deposit. If not done this way, it would be of little value if Payee info is lost from the Payee field and only stored in the memo field.

Also see the related IDEA here: Restore Transactions Downloading Acceptance and Matching workflow

If you find this feature helpful, please be sure to add your VOTE to increase the count of this post and therefore its visibility to other users and to the developers.

smayer97

This IDEA has been added to the List of Requests for Downloading Data into Quicken.
You may want to click on the underlined link to add your vote to more related ideas. Your VOTE matters! 

(If you find this reply helpful, please be sure to click "Like", so others will know, thanks.)

smayer97

This IDEA has been added to the List of Requests for Downloading Data into Quicken.
You may want to click on the underlined link to add your vote to more related ideas. Your VOTE matters! 

(If you find this reply helpful, please be sure to click "Like", so others will know, thanks.)

John Keating

I receive monthly rent from three different people sharing the same housing unit. Each appears as a separate transaction in my bank register. Since they really comprise a single rent payment for the unit, I'd like to be able to select all three of them and merge them into a single split transaction that shares the same Payee and whose amount is the total of the three.

Additionally, I'd like to be able to set this process up as a scheduled transaction so that that when the three transactions are downloaded, they match to the single split transaction so I don't have to do it manually each time.

jacobs

@John Keating I understand what you're wanting to do, but I'm not sure how Quicken would be able to know which of three deposits to your bank account to combine into one transaction. And what if one pays late or early; how could Quicken know which monthly transaction to merge it into?

But programming logic aside, I'd suggest that doing what you propose wouldn't be wise from an accounting standpoint. You want Quicken to mirror your financial accounts in real life. If there are three deposits in your bank account, you really want to have three transactions in Quicken to match them up against. If they were somehow combined into one deposit, it would be very difficult to reconcile Quicken against your bank account. (For instance, what if two of the three payments comes in before your bank account statement date, and one comes in after.)

Here's an alternative, if you're looking for help organizing and keeping track of the rent payments: keep the deposit transactions separate, but use Tags to allow you to track/report on your rent activity. You could use a different tag for each renter, so you could get a report on each individually as well as the aggregate. Or you could use the same tag on each of the three payments, if that would be useful. Or you could use a tag for each month, so each payment for March rent would get the March tag, to enable you to spot if any of the payments is missing. You can use multiple tags on a transaction as well, if you wanted to combine any of those ideas -- the point is tags give you some flexibility for searches or reports.

NotACPA

OR, you could create an "Undeposited Checks" account ... and direct the rental checks into that account instead of your checking account.  THEN, make a transfer from the "Undeposited Checks" account into your bank account.

This preserves: the single deposit into your bank, which individuals paid, and when they paid.

jacobs

@NotACPA But John describes three deposits into his bank, not one. If there were just one deposit, it would be a single transaction in his Quicken register, in need of splitting; he describes having three transactions downloaded into his Quicken register which he wanted to combine. That's why I suggested what I did above: keeping the Quicken register in parallel with the bank account transactions.

John Keating

It's nice to see such an active community of people who are engaged with helping to improve the product. Thanks for the feedback and the good points made. Here are some more ideas on the feature:

Jacob - in my case, all three transactions always appear (as ACH deposits) from the same payee and on the same day, so I never have any that are offset in time. I'd think that Quicken's existing matching algorithm, which seems to use payee and amount as the primary criteria, would be able to match/merge them into one. It seems reasonable to require all merge-able transactions to exist at the time the merging takes place, otherwise they'd just remain separate.

I'm not sure I'm understanding your point about reconciling however. I manually merge the separate transactions into a single split now and since the totals represent the sum of the individual transactions, the math adds up. I always reconcile with the electronic balance (not statements), but either way, the matching could merge as many as exist at the time, and any late ones would remain separate. Perhaps I'm not understanding the case you're describing though.

I already use tags extensively to differentiate rental properties, but the purpose of this new feature wouldn't be for reporting or tracking, but for simplifying/compacting the register by taking advantage of splits (despite our inability to mass edit splits; but that's a different feature request!).

NotACPA - I don't believe the separate account idea would work since I run all my properties through a single bank account and use the download feature to keep the single register in sync with the bank.

I realize that the scheduled part of this feature request is more complex and might require additional UI steps (like choosing what payee name and memo to use on the merged transaction, or specifying how to handle missing transactions), so the basic request is really just the ability to manually combine multiple transactions into a single, split transaction. 

jacobs

@John Keating I get the picture of what you're asking for. I'd guess that very few Quicken users would want to have Quicken automatically merge two or more deposits on the same day into a single transaction. Imagine if someone deposits a paycheck, a reimbursement check and a gift check at an ATM on the same day, and Quicken merged them into one transaction -- that could be a mess. Most people would want to have each transaction that appears in their bank statement (printed or online) match a transaction in their Quicken register.

The best I could envision is if Quicken were to add a function where you could manually click on two or more transactions and have it merge them into a single transaction with multiple split lines, as you suggested. Even that could be tricky, though: if the Payees are not the same, which Payee should survive? If the transactions area day apart, can they be merged, and if so, on which day?

My guess is that this is a feature that few users need, and therefore might fall pretty far down the developers' roadmap. But you can certainly submit it as a feature idea. Unfortunately, message threads in this Category ("Errors and Troubleshooting") don't support user voting, so you'll need to re-post the request in the "Product Ideas - Quicken for Mac" category.

smayer97

Doesn't QWin had the functionality that can either match multiple downloaded transactions to one entry in Quicken or one downloaded transaction to multiple Quicken entries, or both? 

I also believe there already is a QMac IDEA along these lines. Not much time now but when I come across it, I will update info here.

John Keating

Yeah I thought I'd heard of this as a QWin feature. I believe the questions of how to implement are solvable and I suspect it would be useful to others as a way to combine related transactions into a single transaction, as is my case. That's really the whole point of splits as far as I'm concerned, so this is a quick way to construct a split when the transactions have been downloaded or created in advance.

Quicken_Tyka

Hello all,

The Community Support team regularly reviews long-standing posts and Ideas for relevancy and current interest. This Idea seems to have stalled and we would like to gauge the current interest in this request. 

If you would like to see this idea implemented, please add your vote and a comment explaining how this idea would be beneficial for you. More information, including steps to vote and how to submit your own Ideas for future product features/improvements, is also available here.

Thank you,

Quicken Community Support Team

smayer97

This is at a minimum a Windows parity request... but goes beyond to request matching either way... many (manual entries)-to-one (download) or one (manual entry)-to-many (downloads).

NotACPA

I'm only aware of a 1-to-1 match for downloaded transactions into  QWin.

smayer97

Then what is @splasher referring to here?

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20092235/#Comment_20092235

splasher

Here is how:



You do a "Match Manually", and you pick multiple EXISTING transactions which are merged into a split to match up with downloaded transactions.  In my example, I dummied up a single transaction for $30.19 so that I could pick a group of three transactions to match to the d/l'd transaction of $127.05.
Easy, peasy.
Something I learned from NoWayJose a long time ago.

smayer97

Thanks @splasher ... so a many (manual entries)-to-one (download) match.

BTW, what does the ending split transaction look like? Does it preserve the original manually entered info, like original payee?

Also, what happens if one of those manual matches is also a split itself?

NotACPA

@splasher, Obviously, I'd never seen that before.  THANKS!

splasher

Good questions that I had no answer for, so I tested.
It preserves the split in the new transaction.

The original manual transactions:



The manual match (nothing checked yet).  :



The resulting split transaction, it has the d/l'd transaction's Payee:



The expanded split of the resultant transaction:

splasher

Forgot to check what happens if the split has transfer.
It successfully retains the transfer in the split:



End result:



BTW, original Payees go into the split's Memo.

Chris_QPW

I would love to see a "usage number" on how many people actually use this feature in Quicken Windows.  Yes, I know there isn't such a thing, but my guess is almost no one uses it.  Notice how many people are voting for this idea.

A lot of that might have to do with how it is implemented in Quicken Windows.  I don't think people also consider all the problems this feature has created over the years.

@splasher's manual transaction entry list seems go be pretty small, but people have reported having thousands of transactions on that list.  Why?
Well you start with the fact that any amount/date can now match.
Then you add in a hidden posting date marked off as the only way to get it off of that list.
In theory it should be removed from the list when a download matched it, but depending on what some people were doing, bugs in Quicken and such very long lists were the result.  And the only way to get a transaction off of the list is a "hidden key sequence" that is has to be done on every single transaction in the register that "applies".  I believe they limit that list to about 30 days these days.

On top of that whereas this function sort of does what some people want, it doesn't do what I think even more people would like.  Something that happens to a lot more people goes like this.  You have a reminder setup for a bill that varies slightly every month.  You set the reminder to an approximate value, and when you download the transaction you would like to match that transaction and adjust the amount of that transaction to the amount of the downloaded amount.  Instead if you use this manual match it will create an extra split line to make up for difference between the two.

And now on top of this you have the request for the merging to be automatic.  That would be a pure guess, and that usually leads to even more problems for people.

When you have "a feature" that is of limited use to the general customer base, and even in that group have different opinions on how such feature should work, it is asking for trouble.