How do I teach Quicken for MAC to remember a category for different payees?

GJRATX

Very frustrating correcting the categories the Quicken automatically selects for each charge/payee. for every new transaction Can't a user teach quicken which category the user wants quicken to select and then quicken will use that category automatically for that charge/payee in the future. Am I missing something basic that will let me currently do this no brainer fix?

UKR

It's my understanding that the programmers are working on a better method for a future version of Q Mac.
Meanwhile please try this:
Manually record a correctly named and categorized transaction before you do the next download containing a transaction for this payee.
After download drag the downloaded transaction over the one you manually created. That should teach Quicken how to do it for future transactions for the same payee.

smayer97

In other words, they broke it and they are trying to fix it...

They have the technology; they can make it better, stronger, faster(?)...

UKR

It's my understanding that the programmers are working on a better method for a future version of Q Mac.
Meanwhile please try this:
Manually record a correctly named and categorized transaction before you do the next download containing a transaction for this payee.
After download drag the downloaded transaction over the one you manually created. That should teach Quicken how to do it for future transactions for the same payee.

smayer97

In other words, they broke it and they are trying to fix it...

They have the technology; they can make it better, stronger, faster(?)...

GJRATX

> @UKR said:
> It's my understanding that the programmers are working on a better method for a future version of Q Mac.
> Meanwhile please try this:
> Manually record a correctly named and categorized transaction before you do the next download containing a transaction for this payee.
> After download drag the downloaded transaction over the one you manually created. That should teach Quicken how to do it for future transactions for the same payee.

THANKS for your prompt feedback! I will try this on Monday and report back to the group.

GJRATX

> @smayer97 said:
> In other words, they broke it and they are trying to fix it...
>
> They have the technology; they can make it better, stronger, faster(?)...


IMHO, Quicken's now more expensive yearly subscription service is almost amateurish without this correct categorization ability.

Hopefully, Quicken software development leadership reads this forum and will strongly consider fixing/providing sooner rather than later...

jacobs

@GJRATX The product manager for Quicken Mac does occasionally visit this forum and post here, most often around the time of each new release. But he isn't reading these forum posts on a regular basis. However, as has been noted above, he has previously acknowledged this issue and said they are working on it. How many more months of development work is involved, we don't know.

SSteve

I'd also like to see this addressed. For payees (e.g. Amazon) where it's not always the same category, I'd love to always have it come in as Uncategorized. Otherwise it comes in as whatever category I happened to assign last which is almost always incorrect.

jacobs

@SSteve Your post illustrates the mess and complexity of this issue. Many users are complaining that all their transactions are coming in uncategorized, and just want them to use the same category they last used for each Payee; you're having them come in with the last category used, and wish it wouldn't! But further, you want Quicken to know that some Payees, such as Amazon, always have different categories and should come in uncategorized, while other Payees (such as utility bills) should always use the same categories.

In order to achieve this, the developers will have to provide a mechanism for users to specify categorization rules on a Payee-by-Payee basis. (In Quicken 2007 for Mac, for instance, it was possible to "memorize" a Payee with no category, so subsequent transactions would not have a category.) Exactly how the developers are going to deliver all the functionality users are asking for isn't yet known, other than the product manager saying they were working on something to satisfy the desire for memorized transactions. I think his comment indicated we'd expect to see this -- or at least a first piece of this -- sometime this year.

UKR

SSteve said:

I'd also like to see this addressed. For payees (e.g. Amazon) where it's not always the same category, I'd love to always have it come in as Uncategorized. Otherwise it comes in as whatever category I happened to assign last which is almost always incorrect.

To work around this, I've set up a transaction with multiple split lines, one for each of the most frequently used categories, like clothing, garden maint., pool maint., sales tax, etc.
I always manually record my purchases and fill out the split information as needed before I download the new charges from the credit card company. No guessing or crystal balls required on behalf of Quicken and my transactions are always correctly categorized right from the start.

GJRATX

> @UKR said:
> SSteve said:
>
>
> I'd also like to see this addressed. For payees (e.g. Amazon) where it's not always the same category, I'd love to always have it come in as Uncategorized. Otherwise it comes in as whatever category I happened to assign last which is almost always incorrect.
>
>
>
>
> To work around this, I've set up a transaction with multiple split lines, one for each of the most frequently used categories, like clothing, garden maint., pool maint., sales tax, etc.
> I always manually record my purchases and fill out the split information as needed before I download the new charges from the credit card company. No guessing or crystal balls required on behalf of Quicken and my transactions are always correctly categorized right from the start.

THANKS for your prompt informative response.

I wasn't able figure out your workaround. It seems like a lot of effort for a basic feature that should be part of any professional-quality personal accounting program that people need to subscribe to. If Quicken were free to acquire and use then I could understand if such a feature were missing.

GJRATX

It would be reassuring to hear from a real Quicken employee that they are doing something to fix the above problem, and that they actually read this forum.

jacobs

@GJRATX As I said, Quicken was built with some auto-categorization functionality initially, and some part of that has apparently been broken since an update late last year.

The only Quicken employee who posts on this forum about product development plans is the Quicken Mac product manager, Quicken Marcus. He definitely does not read everything on this forum, but he does pop in from time to time. The best time to see comments from Marcus is when a new version is released (and we know from a recent Announcement post that a new release is expected shortly); he posts a new thread about the new features and fixes, and he usually monitors that thread immediately following the release to see if users are reporting problems. If the next release does not address this issue, I'd suggest trying to post in that thread to ask him the status of their development of this feature.

He has previously said on several occassions that they are working on building a "memorized transaction" or "QuickFill" capability similar to Quicken Windows and Quicken Mac 2007. For instance, in a post back in October 2018, he wrote: "We're working on bringing the memorize transaction feature to the latest version of Quicken Mac in the not too distant feature."

Currently, auto-categorization is done by the servers that process downloading transactions (which is contracted through former parent Intuit), and it will only work if you are using Quicken's default categories. (Those cateogries have some internal category ID assigned to them which can be used for the auto-categorization.) Of course, that's only a half-baked solution that won't work for many longtime users who have customized thier own categories. When they implement the memorized transaction or QuickFill functionality, the expectation is that this will allow downloaded transactions to apply categories a user has previously used for a Payee instead of using some default category or leaving the transaction uncategorized. We won't know the details of how this is all implemented until they release it -- something that's hopefully coming later this year.