Auto assign not working?

Henry Cline

For the last few months the auto assign is not working on my direct connect downloads? I didnt change anything knowingly on my end. Can someone guide me through trouble shooting this?

Thanks very much

jacobs

The short answer is: it's broken, but they're working on a fix.

Slightly longer answer… the modern Quicken Mac program was not built to allow users to look into or control how transactions for specific Payees were categorized; it was supposed to "learn" by a complex method of creating a correct manual transaction and dragging it over a downloaded transaction. That worked to some extent, but users wanted much more control over the categorization rules for each Payee. So the developers set about to add additional functionality borrowing from the legacy Quicken 2007 for Mac and Quicken Windows, and said this was a long-term development project. In one of the updates late in 2018, they apparently broke something while doing some of the under-the-hood work to prepare for the new functionality coming sometime this year. So things actually went from so-so to non-functional, at least for some users. We've been told that the developers are aware of the problems, and help is on the way -- but we don't know when this new functionality will be released (From some hints, it seemed likely to be in the next release or two, but development schedules often change it they run into snags or testing uncovers problems.)

dotyman

I'm having the same problem. 

[rant redacted]

jacobs

@Henry Cline Please clarify what you mean by "auto assign." Are you referring to assignment of categories on downloaded transactions, or something else?

Henry Cline

assignment of categories on downloaded transactions-Yes

jacobs

The short answer is: it's broken, but they're working on a fix.

Slightly longer answer… the modern Quicken Mac program was not built to allow users to look into or control how transactions for specific Payees were categorized; it was supposed to "learn" by a complex method of creating a correct manual transaction and dragging it over a downloaded transaction. That worked to some extent, but users wanted much more control over the categorization rules for each Payee. So the developers set about to add additional functionality borrowing from the legacy Quicken 2007 for Mac and Quicken Windows, and said this was a long-term development project. In one of the updates late in 2018, they apparently broke something while doing some of the under-the-hood work to prepare for the new functionality coming sometime this year. So things actually went from so-so to non-functional, at least for some users. We've been told that the developers are aware of the problems, and help is on the way -- but we don't know when this new functionality will be released (From some hints, it seemed likely to be in the next release or two, but development schedules often change it they run into snags or testing uncovers problems.)

Henry Cline

Fantastic answer and far from what I expected. Too bad, but I guess I will always feel lucky as I have been using Quicken since in first started and there was a time when the Mac version was discontinued due to lack of users.