Add a Way to Prevent Tags from Being Added Automatically

[email protected]

Currently Quicken for Mac (I’m running version 5.11.0) will automatically add tags to new transactions based on what tags it thinks you might want associated with a transaction. This is nice in some ways, but I would love a way to prevent this from happening automatically. Here’s why:

I donate a certain amount of each paycheck to charity, but I don’t have this automatically deducted; rather, I manually write a check to the charity organization after getting paid, after which I would like to be able to add a tag to my paycheck transaction to document that I have donated from that paycheck. Over time, Quicken notices that I often add this tag to paycheck transactions, and is now automatically adding it, which makes it difficult to tell which paychecks I have actually donated from.

It would be really nice to be able to dictate whether or not Quicken can automatically add tags to transactions based on what it “thinks” we want or not. Better yet, it would be nice to be able to set custom rules to exclude specific tags from being automatically applied so that users can still benefit from Quicken’s machine learning for most tags, while excluding a few specific ones from being automatically added.

I understand that there are other methods of tracking which paychecks have been donated from, but I would love to be able to use tags to track this so that the notes field can be used for other things.

jacobs

Quicken never automatically places tags in a transaction. However, if you are using an existing Payee, Quicken will use the details from the last payment/deposit for that Payee -- and that's what I suspect you're observing. So if you edit the latest transaction for your paycheck deposit not to include a tag, then entering that same deposit again should mirror the previous transaction with no tag.

Side question: if you're writing checks to the charities, and categorizing them as such, do you need to tag your paycheck deposit? A report of the charity payments would typically be what most people want to see.

[email protected]

@jacobs The tags are just a way for me to easily see that I've donated from that paycheck. I do use the report of charity payments at the end of the year, but often times I wait to write a charity check for two or three pay periods, so quickly being able to go back and see which paychecks I have donated from (by seeing if it has a certain tag) makes it easier to know which checks I have yet to contribute charity from, if that makes sense.

And I get your idea of removing the tag from the previous instance of that payee being used, but that doesn't really help in this case, because most likely I want the previous instance to have the tag (to note that I have donated from that paycheck). I just don't want the new instance to have the tag show up until I manually and deliberately add the tag.

[email protected]

Maybe it would be better to request a way to not use details from the last payment/deposit for a payee and automatically fill them in new transactions, or at least give an option in preferences to choose whether this happens or not, as I'm sure some people like that functionality.

jacobs

If you are adding transactions manually, there is an override to using information from the previous transaction to the same Payee: enter the Payee name and then Option+Tab to advance out of the Payee field. This will retain the Payee name, but contain no amount, notes, tags, categories, and splits from a prior transaction. This is useful in many cases, but it probably would not be useful for a paycheck deposit, where you want to retain a long list of splits.

Again, if you are entering transactions manually, what I'd suggest to do what you want is to make two separate Payees with some minor variation in the name -- like "Paycheck Deposit" and "Paycheck Deposit*" -- and use one with the tag you want and one without. This way, you can select which one to use each time you enter a paycheck, and it will include or omit the tag.