Prevent Auto-Creation of Categories (in Q Mac)

RA2

Please stop the automatic creation of categories.  It's beyond belief that there is no control to prevent automatic creation of categories like Quicken for Windows.

I have seen other posts about merging categories when something is created by accident on the fly. However, that is not the right solution.  Please increase the amount of preferences available to Mac users. 

Quicken for Windows was the perfect blue-print and it was ignored when you built Quicken for Mac. Please add this vital control so categories are not created by accident which throws off budgets and reports.  I should not have to periodically review for new categories to add to budgets and reports.....I already have what I need created.

jacobs

How and where are you seeing categories get automatically created in Quicken Mac? Quicken Mac has a large set of default categories which are there from the moment you create your file, but I wasn't aware of new categories appearing over time. Could you give examples of the categories, and what actions produced these new categories?

RA2

If you are entering a transaction and type a category and it doesn’t exist, it will get automatically created when you save the transaction.  There should be a control to give Mac users the option to allow or not allow this function like Windows. 

If you are using Quicken for Mac to closely track a budget, you will occasionally be surprised to find transaction in a new category. It could be 1+ months before you identify this unless you are remembering to check categories a couple times per month like I have been doing since using Mac version. 

jacobs

@RA2 Ah, I understand your comment now. When you're entering a transaction and you type in the Category field, if you've typed a category that doesn't exist, the drop-down menu shows that you can create it as a new category...



It only creates the new category if you accept the default to Create new category, but it's easy to tab to the next field and accept it. So what you're describing is basically user error, but one that is too easy to make. And you're asking for is either a warning to ask you to confirm that you really want to create the new category, and/or the ability to lock categories such that new ones cannot be created in data entry, only from the Categories window. Sounds like a good idea to me!

This falls into a class of actions that users have asked the program to safeguard against with warnings or optional warnings, such as deleting a transaction without realizing it. So far, the developers haven't implemented a bunch of optional warnings or locks, but it's not clear whether they are opposed to the ideas or are just concentrating on bigger issues than these types of small user interface refinements. Unfortunately, the list of enhancement requests from customers number in the hundreds, so some of them are going to take a long time before they are acted on.

Festus500

@RA2 Amen. I concur 100%

@jacobs - a legit accounting software should have access / change controls to make sure you can easily audit the system. If you build in controls up front it saves dozens of hours of Ad Hoc review and repair. Sure the batch change mode works for some transactions but is useless when you have split transactions. Suggest a configuration control board with user reps - then to get changes made we could crowd fund the ones users most want

jacobs

@Festus500  Quicken (the company) seems open to accepting user feedback in a variety of ways, including: reports from their Customer Support teams who deal with many thousands of customers and can report problem/pain areas, Idea threads on this site which receive significant support from fellow users, and feedback from users engaged in their beta testing program. But they don't have an easy way for customers to directly submit enhancement ideas, and don't offer anything like a user group webinar where users could make suggestions to their product teams. They conduct surveys periodically where users can rank some priorities, but they are not frequent and often don't allow freeform input, and are sometimes more marketing-focused on things they have already decided to do than idea-focused on things they might consider doing.

So the good news is they do listen to their customers; the bad news is they don't listen enough, or make it easy enough for customer input to positively effect their efforts.

As a quick example of the former: the comment from @RA2 and my reply above were from April 2019, and since then, they have added a warning dialog box on the deletion of a transaction, which hadn't existed previously. They clearly listened to user requests and/or tracked Support Calls where users had inadvertently deleted transactions without realizing it. So, although it might have been a long time in coming, it was a positive step forward.

On the other hand, even when ideas requested on this forum end up being implemented, it becomes clear from their implementation -- and often the iterations over subsequent releases -- that the development team often hasn't fully read the comments and suggestions before building the feature, and therefore doesn't fully understand what users are asking for until after they've released a feature and complaints drive them to tweak it. 

kdp2852

Please make this change soon........I want to categorize myself, I don't need quicken to categorize my transactions for me.

Quicken Jared

kdp2852 said:

Please make this change soon........I want to categorize myself, I don't need quicken to categorize my transactions for me.

Hello kdp2852,

You should be able to categorize transactions yourself, either by clicking on the transactions in the register and editing them, or by going into 'Categories' in 'Window' at the Quicken menu in the top of the screen. I might have misunderstood, however; were you referring to something else?

Thanks,

Quicken Jared

jacobs

kdp2852 said:

Please make this change soon........I want to categorize myself, I don't need quicken to categorize my transactions for me.

@kdp2852 If might help if you posted again about what change you're wanting to see in Quicken Mac, and/or what issue you're having with categorizing transactions. The original point of this thread was to request a preference setting to prevent a user who is manually entering a transaction and misspells a category from accidentally creating a new category.

It sounds like perhaps you want to disable auto-categorization when you download transactions? You can go to Preferences > Connected Services and uncheck the box for "Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories." As it says, this affects both auto-categorization and Payee name clean-up/normalization which typically occurs in the background as transactions are downloaded. So turning if off might move to be both a help and a hindrance, but you can certainly try it to see if you prefer the results with that setting turned off.

And you can always create QuickFill Rules which will take precedence over any auto-categorization, for maximum control. QuickFill Rules allow you to define what category(ies) to use for each Payee name. These rules are a very powerful and very customizable feature. If you need help with how to work with QuickFill Rules, please create a post about that. 

dental_floss

Quicken Mac _seemed_ to have this bad-automatic-categorization-of-downloaded-transactions under control until a recent release of 6.x.x (not sure which). Since I upgraded to the latest version (6.4.5) from a previous version (not sure which), I see that quicken is once again categorizing my downloads when I instruct it to not do that. If a commercial accounting/financial software product did this, one could imagine there would be legal ramifications.

Quicken needs to stop modifying our 'golden' downloaded data.

Only the user should be the one allowed to make or allow modifications to data.

jacobs

@dental_floss There are for sure no legal ramifications, even if there's a bug in the software — but if there's a bug, it should be investigated and hopefully fixed. But first: have you checked your preferences to see if the checkbox for "automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories" is unchecked. Sometimes in updates, preference settings get inexplicably changed. If so, this might be an easy issue for you to correct.

mackworth

Going back to the original request: Quicken, PLEASE provide an option to NOT create categories while entering transactions. Every couple months, I find I need to go back through my category list and remove typos and other mistaken categories (but first I have to go find the transactions that created them). As an example, it's way too easy to type "cash" and have it inadvertently create a Cash category (versus the Cash account).

jacobs

@mackworth I'd note that this Idea has garnered only 13 votes over four years. That doesn't mean it's not a worthwhile idea, but it does mean it hasn't been passed to the developers to consider for implementation because there are so many other feature requests have drawn more user support. And as we all have seen, the developers can implement only a small number of requested features every month or two. (I'm not opposed; I'm actually one of the 13 votes in support of such a feature. 😉)

So anyone reading this who wants such a feature, be sure to vote by clicking the little black arrow in the yellow box under the first post at the top of this page.

dental_floss

Well, r&d probably look at this as an enhancement request, even when customers point out that it is a bug. When they sent me my last “your subscription is expiring, renew now” notice, my response was to let me know when they have fixed these basic bugs and I will reconsider subscribing again. As you may guess, it has been crickets from quicken.

I have moved on to better ways of managing my money using downloadable transaction data from my bank and spreadsheets. My unadulterated data is always immediately available and categorizing is easy. Reports are easy. Graphs are easy.

Not once have I had the need to call up Support because of a problem with my spreadsheet software, or with the transactions I imported. It’s amazing how much time I’ve saved since moving on.

rk2aa

Regardless of votes, this is a needed enhancement. BTW, it exists in Windows version……for years. Mac version had the perfect blueprint (fully functioning and vetted) for building from and they ignored it.

This is a simple enhancement to implement. It can be coded with minimal effort (Hey Quicken…..contact me if you can't do it in a matter of a few minutes) and tested with minimal effort. Who cares how many votes it has right now. Any financial app should have proper controls……It is the right thing to do.

jacobs

@rk2aa I can point you to dozens and dozens of feature requests users deem to be just a "simple enhancement". First, I'd say that if they were all so simple, they would have done them all in a busy week or two of work; of course, many such requests turn out to have more complexity than perceived. But overall, they have to decide which ideas they think have the biggest impact or solve the biggest problems. You may say "who cares how many votes it has," the requests on this site with very few votes don't even get sent to the developers for consideration. That doesn't mean any particular idea won't get done; it may be something they have on their radar — but Ideas which attract a lot of votes are much more likely to be given higher priority.

This is a reasonable enhancement request (It's not a bug.) It's not the biggest thing, but it would make the program easier to use. There are lots of such requests. I imagine most of them will get done some day. But I'd list many other missing features as much higher priorities. You might disagree, and that's fine. So again, we come back to user votes as a way to help the developers choose which things to do now, do soon, and do later — because they don't have the capacity to do them all now.

dental_floss

Good luck ya’ll.

jacobs

@dental_floss I'm curious why you're continuing to follow and post in the Quicken forum since you say you've moved on from Quicken and are happy with the solutions you've switched to for tracking your finances. If you're saving time, and you're happy with your financial tracking, why have you continued reading and posting here? I'm not suggesting you can't or shouldn't (I'm just another Quicken user), it just seems odd if you've really moved on.

dental_floss

Since you’re curious, I received 2 mail notifications today from this thread, and my first thought was, “hey, they may have actually fixed the bug!” So my inquiring mind forced me to login and check it out.

After reading, and seeing that it was just more user banter, I decided to provide an update on how I solved the problem. I had used both Windows and Mac quicken for many years and I do not miss quicken, and I have more time on my hands now. I am no longer a fan of what it has become.

I just figured out how to un-follow this thread, so I guess this will be my final post.

I do wish you all the best in your personal finance software journey.

Sad Mac Convert

Doing my books for 2022 and came here to figureout how to edit my preferences to prevent Quicken from automatically creating new categories. Sadly, it appears there has been no movement on this. I was really hoping that Quicken would get Q for Mac up to speed. Disappointed again. Maybe next year!

danielle.mdale

Just went through and batch edited transactions associated with "new" categories I had inadvertently created while moving quickly over the past few months. Then I went through and manually edited all the splits (which takes a bit more time if you're as into doing splits as me!). I realize this is user error, but I'd love to be able to prevent this particular user from messing up their accounting yet again with a simple "do not automatically create new categories when I'm typing" check box in the preferences.

I know there are only 14 people voting for this, but I suspect there's a large number of users who would actually benefit from this change that aren't irritated enough by it to find this particular forum post and vote on it 🤦‍♂️

danielle.mdale

Fun tip: change the name of the incorrect category to something unique and easy to search for (like "another stupid category automatically created by my nimble fingers" or some such rubbish name) and do a Category search in your register for that term. As you go through and fix the splits, watch them disappear from your list. This is much better than having two identically named categories that you're searching for.