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City being added to Payee Name

Joe A Lopez

Recently downloads from Wells Fargo and Citibank are adding he city location of a merchant in the Payee field. For example a charge at "McDonalds" will be downloaded as "Mcdonald's F34547 Palm Desert Ca".

Problem this is causing is that I can no longer run a Mini-Report for a given merchant because each download for McDonalds will not be unique. Is the City info being added by Wells Fargo/Citibank or by the Direct Connect interface?

How can this be fixed, so that only the Merchant Name is in the Payee field?

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unknown

Windows or Mac?

Joe A Lopez

Windows 10.

unknown

OK what you need to do is add renaming rules.

Tools -> Renaming Rules
You can also add these from the pull down menu of the payee field in the register.

You specify what the Payee name should end up as, and you specify what word(s) in the downloaded payee it should match to decide to use this renaming rule.

Here is an example:

Image: https://d2r1vs3d9006ap.cloudfront.net/s3_images/1759095/RackMultipart20181027-92536-n8tm8p-RenamePayee_inline.PNG?1540610092

If "McDonald's" appears in the downloaded payee, it will be changed to "McDonalds".

Note renaming rules only kick in when you download a transaction.

To fix transactions that are already in the register use: Edit -> Find & Replace.

unknown

I should have also mentioned to make sure this option is on:
Edit -> Preferences -> Downloaded transactions -> Use my existing renaming rules

And getting your payee names "uniformed" isn't only important for the mini reports.

The payees flow into the use of the Memorized Payees (Tools -> Memorized Payee List

If you have these options on:
Edit -> Preferences -> Data entry and QuickFill -> Complete fields using previous entries
Edit -> Preferences -> Data entry and QuickFill -> Recall memorized payees

The if the resulting payee matches a payee in your memorized payee list, Quicken will use the category in that memorized payee.

Like this:

mshiggins

Thanks for the excellent instructions!

Joe A Lopez

Thank you for all the suggestions but I don't think the issue I'm having is related to a configuration issue. Looking back through my registers, particularly credit card transactions, the anomaly with the Payee name began in middle of August. I made no changes to Quicken settings to my knowledge.

Prior to posting my request for help, I completely cleared all memorized payees and have never used Renaming Rules as I never had a need for this feature. From what I can deduce on my own, the download interface is what changed in middle of August, or a Quicken update may have caused the issue.

I'll try some of the suggestions above regarding the use of Rename Rules as a workaround, but I shouldn't have to. Logically speaking, payee name should only contact the name of the Merchant as mapped by the sending bank. Merchant location and Phone Number should not be concatenated into the Payee field - which appears to be what is happening. Maybe the sending bank is at fault? Unfortunately, I can't troubleshoot that end of it.

Thanks for trying to help.

UKR

One shouldn't need many Renaming Rules. I only have 3 Renaming Rules in existence. But, in certain situations like your McD's, they sure do come in handy.

Joe A Lopez

Upon further analysis, the issue involving Payees is originating from Wells Fargo in my situation. They are including the merchant location or other identifying information along with the merchant name in the transaction description field. That description from the bank-side matches exactly to what is being downloaded by Quicken and added to my register.

Apparently, I have no choice but to use Renaming rules to strip away the extraneous data so that I can create mini-reports based on unique Payee Name, or other reports based on Payee's. Ugh!

unknown

You must be very lucky to have credit cards and such to give you such "clean names". I have about 90 of them. Basically about one for every one of my memorized payees.

unknown

BTW I will mention a couple more options:
Edit -> Preferences -> Downloaded transactions -> Automatically create rules when I rename payees
Edit -> Preferences -> Downloaded transactions -> Let me review/confirm the automatically created rules

Those might make it easier to create the renaming rules instead of jumping in and adding your own.
But I'm not so sure how good Quicken is about getting the right "keyword(s)" for the match to the downloaded payee, so be sure to turn on the confirmation.

I personally like to create my own.

The renaming rules tend to be a bit of a pain at first, but pretty quickly you build up the ones you deal with all the time, and it "just works".

Consider yourself lucky. On the Mac side they don't have any renaming rules. Or should I say they don't have any they can directly edit. They basically do some kind of drag and drop of the a transaction with the right name on the downloaded one, and it creates it own hidden rules.

Automatically creating renaming rules and memorized payees can be great for getting started, but no guessing like that is perfect and sooner or later you need direct control of it. And the Mac people don't have that.

Joe A Lopez

Yes, I turned on those two options and went through my registers and created rules for merchants I use frequently. Thanks for the advice.

unknown

@UKR by any chance do you have this option on?
Edit -> Preferences -> Downloaded transactions -> Automatically apply Quicken's suggested name to payee

This might explain your clean payee names if it is on.

It would do this exact kind of clean up (if a renaming rule doesn't already match), but there is of course a catch. It is guessing and as such can change names from a "local" payee to "national/more recognized" payee.

And as a result when people come complaining about their payee names getting changed to things they don't expect, the recommendation is to turn this one off.

Joe A Lopez

I don't have that option enabled. But thanks for the advice.

UKR

QPW,
I think, my clean list of Renaming Rules stems mostly from the fact that I'm old-fashioned. I always manually record all my transactions using "clean" MPL entries before I download from the banks. The downloaded transactions then match to my manual entries without the need for Renaming Rules.

Anybody who manually accepts downloaded transactions and makes the necessary Payee Name corrections in the new transaction line BEFORE clicking Accept should be able to achieve a "clean" register with meaningful Payee Names (and not the gobbledygook downloaded from the banks).

unknown

Yes, that explains it.

I prefer the work of creating the renaming rules. :-)

unknown

I was looking at another thread and thought, I wonder how good Quicken's guessing

(Edit -> Preferences -> Downloaded transactions -> Automatically apply Quicken's suggested name to payee)

to clean up the Payee names really is these days. So I decided to try it out on a fresh data file, and I was surprised to see it is quite good.

I think as long as they aren't any kind of unique "local name" it might do quite well. So I guess I really should update my "belief/recommendations" on this.
Here is some examples:

Also I haven't had any new payees in so long I haven't seen there "confirm" dialog for creating a renaming rule when you rename a payee, and it is different in the subscription Quicken (2018/2019) than I remember.

You can click on each word that applies. For instance I just clicked on Safeway.

I had typed: Safeway My Way for the payee and with that selection above it created this renaming rule, which is exactly what I wanted.

And note that the renaming rules are checked first. So you can have this option on and if it gives you results you don't like for a given payee, just add a renaming rule for that one payee. Here is an example of that:

So, turning off this option when it "guesses wrong", was the wrong advice.
And I caused you some unneeded work by the looks of it.
All that is needed is to add a renaming rule for the "exception".

Sorry about that, and even more sorry that others now have this feature turned off because of my past bad advice.