Quicken for Mac v5.12 Released

Austin@

I mark scheduled transactions as paid on a regular basis, and when the matching transaction downloads from the bank they definitely still auto match whether it was a scheduled transaction before marking it as paid or whether it was a manual transaction that wasn’t scheduled. 

RCinNJ

Austin said:

I mark scheduled transactions as paid on a regular basis, and when the matching transaction downloads from the bank they definitely still auto match whether it was a scheduled transaction before marking it as paid or whether it was a manual transaction that wasn’t scheduled. 

I let most transactions download. However, what Austin describes is my experience for scheduled checks. I have to mark them "paid" before QM will print them. QM matches them perfectly when they clear the bank. 

Concordman

 The way I understand it when marking a schedule transaction as paid it does decouple it from the scheduling trail of events.  What the item is actually paid and I download the transactions it matches them no problem. 

willi1

> @Quicken Marcus said:
> (Quote)
> When I talk about memorized transactions I'm referring to both the functionality to auto-fill fields of the transaction based on memorized sets of information including the category for downloaded transactions and to present these sets of information when creating new manual transactions.  For example, you can define 3 sets of information (memorized transactions) for Amazon:
> 1) Category = Electronics & Software, Tag = Personal
> 2) Category = Electronics & Software (Business), Tag = Business and
> 3) Category = Office Supplies (Business), Tag = Business
>
> When we download Amazon, we'll use an algorithm to pick one of these groups and most likely I think we will pick the last one used but we could also pick the one used most often.  If we get it wrong the user will be able to click on an arrow to display all 3 options to pick from to quickly fill in the category and other important information.  
>
> We will use memorized transactions to define categories for downloaded transactions based on renamed payees overriding any generic auto-categorization done via our aggregation service.  Does that make sense?

Is there a way to have a category that has previously been chosen in error but now shows up as one of the 3 options to pick from, in your example, so it doesn't show up again?

jacobs

willi said:

Is there a way to have a category that has previously been chosen in error but now shows up as one of the 3 options to pick from, in your example, so it doesn't show up again?

I think the goal is that you will be able to memorize a transaction, and Quicken will then use that as the template for future transacitons from the same Payee. Exactly how this will all work is something we'll have to just wait and see. Marcus was vague -- probably intentionally -- about where they are in the process of designing and implementing what he described; my reading between the lines was that they're working on it but that it's not right around the corner.

Quicken Marcus

jacobs said:

Quicken Marcus said:

For auto-categorization issues, customers should look in Preferences : Connected Services and make sure the "Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories" checkbox is checked.  If it's not checked, we don't do auto-categorization. 

But that only works with Quicken's pre-defined categories, right? It seems what many users expect, or want, is to be able to categorize a transaction the way they want, and to have Quicken "learn" and do it the same time they have a transaction from the same Payee. 

Yes, but I wanted to make sure people checked that first because this is an easy fix.  Also, to be specific, this doesn't work for people who import or convert from 2007 because 2007 didn't have that capability so from New Quicken's perspective all 2007 categories are user-defined. 

In regards to user-defined categories, Quicken remembers the last payee and category pair for every transaction and then uses that for future downloaded transactions.  I personally didn't know this wasn't working for people but our lead tester said he's aware of it but hasn't been able to reproduce it reliably.  Anyway, I don't think we would invest a lot of time in fixing old technology and would instead look forward to memorized transactions to fix this for people.

Quicken Marcus

RCinNJ said:

jacobs said:

Quicken Marcus said:

For auto-categorization issues, customers should look in Preferences : Connected Services and make sure the "Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories" checkbox is checked.  If it's not checked, we don't do auto-categorization. 

But that only works with Quicken's pre-defined categories, right? It seems what many users expect, or want, is to be able to categorize a transaction the way they want, and to have Quicken "learn" and do it the same time they have a transaction from the same Payee. 

jacobs, thanks for point this out. Absolutely that is what this user has been asking for! I guess I SHOULD NOT check "Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories" if Quicken will go back to using its categories and not the ones I created (which fit my way of thinking)?

I would suggest an alternative. Having Quicken auto-categorize is a huge time-saver.  If you don't like the Quicken default category names then rename them.  For example, if you don't like Food & Dining: Fast Food then rename it to something else and move it to another location.  For example, you could move Fast Food under a new category called Discretionary and then rename it to "Greasy Places I Shouldn't Eat" and when McDonald's get downloaded Quicken's auto-categorization engine will auto-categorize it under "Greasy Places I shouldn't Eat". Under-the-hood there is a code assigned to that category which allows auto-categorization to work so even if you've change the name it will continue to work.  But it won't work if you delete it.  Just a suggestion until we have memorized transactions.

willi1

@Jacob

"Is there a way to have a category that has previously been chosen in error but now shows up as one of the 3 options to pick from, in your example, so it doesn't show up again?"

Thanks, Jacob. I was asking about way to remove 'mistakes' from the suggested list based on latest transactions, as I have one particular person that screws up continually, and I thought perhaps I could delete the wrong ones thereby cutting down on mistakes in future, thereby saving my sanity. LOL

smayer97

Quicken Marcus said:

Don Awalt said:

@Quicken Marcus have the BoughtX and SoldX transaction types been implemented in Mac, or at least will they convert properly if migrating from QWin? The last time I tried a conversion from the Windows version my transaction registers were so out of balance from 20 years of these transaction types there was no chance of having a workable file without starting over and giving up transaction history. Thanks!

We have not added the boughtx or soldx types from Quicken Windows but I thought we converted better than you described since this can be represented by 2 separate transactions - one for the buy and the other for the transfer.  Are your accounts single-mutual fund accounts or a 401K account without cash?  It's possible we may have problems with these types of accounts on import but I don't know specifically.

@Quicken Marcus
This has been a known conversion problem for years (I started documenting this specific issue since Mar 2016)! This is a BIG obstacle that many QWin users STILL complain about that prevents them from converting because the ONLY way to handle this is to remove the BuyX and SellX transactions (for some, there are too many transactions to manage manually). I documented this in the following places: 

• List of Obstacles and Hindrances for Migrating from QM2007 or QWin to Quicken for Mac (as ability to link accounts to brokerage accounts (to be able to handle the migration of BuyX, SellX, and RtnCapX transactions))
• additional comment on work-around: https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/18954567/#Comment_18954567
• How do I convert Quicken for Windows files to Quicken for Mac? 
  

Even @J_Mike can attest to this.

I am surprised that you are not more aware of the issues around this. 

smayer97

Quicken Marcus said:

RCinNJ said:

jacobs said:

Quicken Marcus said:

For auto-categorization issues, customers should look in Preferences : Connected Services and make sure the "Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories" checkbox is checked.  If it's not checked, we don't do auto-categorization. 

But that only works with Quicken's pre-defined categories, right? It seems what many users expect, or want, is to be able to categorize a transaction the way they want, and to have Quicken "learn" and do it the same time they have a transaction from the same Payee. 

jacobs, thanks for point this out. Absolutely that is what this user has been asking for! I guess I SHOULD NOT check "Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories" if Quicken will go back to using its categories and not the ones I created (which fit my way of thinking)?

I would suggest an alternative. Having Quicken auto-categorize is a huge time-saver.  If you don't like the Quicken default category names then rename them.  For example, if you don't like Food & Dining: Fast Food then rename it to something else and move it to another location.  For example, you could move Fast Food under a new category called Discretionary and then rename it to "Greasy Places I Shouldn't Eat" and when McDonald's get downloaded Quicken's auto-categorization engine will auto-categorize it under "Greasy Places I shouldn't Eat". Under-the-hood there is a code assigned to that category which allows auto-categorization to work so even if you've change the name it will continue to work.  But it won't work if you delete it.  Just a suggestion until we have memorized transactions.

Of course this does not help those users that have migrated their data from previous versions already using their own categorization. 

s2kdriver

> @jacobs said:
> (Quote)
> Thanks. I mostly enter transactions manually, so I can't verify this… but are you sure that's so? My understanding was that marking a scheduled transaction as paid simply detaches it from the schedule of ongoign transactions and makes it a stand-alone transaction -- just as if you had entered it manually. And as such, it should be able to be matched with a download.

Well, I stand corrected. I download almost all my transactions automatically and enter very few manually. I was not aware that Quicken would match downloads against manual transactions. I thought this only worked with scheduled transactions. I guess it was pretty silly of me to not realize it, and thanks Jacobs for pointing this out. Good to learn something new.

ninaz

@Concordman Thanks for responding about renaming past transactions. After you said that I went back and noticed the little down arrow. That works, but it sure is not intuitive. That arrow looks like it is just part of the dialogue box, not that it has a function. Maybe a screen shot for something like that? Or is there one and I missed it?

ninaz

I noticed that when you click on the view columns where you can check which columns you want to see, it comes up with a lot of the column names missing. I did it several times and then I saw the names, so I didn't mention it. But tonight I looked again and again not all the names were there. However, if you scroll down to another account and click it, it does not switch to that second account and if you go back to the View menu with the first account highlighted, the names are there. It kind of shows the second account in gray. I know this sounds bizarre. Anyone else notice this? I did try closing the app and reopening it. It still happens and it happens in both of the files I have.

smayer97

Evd said:

I installed Version 5.12.2 (Build 512.29221.100) yesterday, and I regret to say that this is a very bad version. So many obvious problems that it looks like it was released without testing.
For example; category totals are wrong when using accounts with different currencies ($ and Euro), after syncing my Amex carts the balance is wrong.
This is not worthy of my annual subscription payment. Deteriorating quality and still important functions missing (e.g. automatically adjust credit car monthly payment to pay full balance).
Can I roll back to the previous verion until the 5.12 works?

If you are mixing transactions with different currencies on the same report, QMac still does not have true multi-currency support. Please confirm.

smayer97

Quicken Marcus said:

jacobs said:

Quicken Marcus said:

For auto-categorization issues, customers should look in Preferences : Connected Services and make sure the "Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories" checkbox is checked.  If it's not checked, we don't do auto-categorization. 

But that only works with Quicken's pre-defined categories, right? It seems what many users expect, or want, is to be able to categorize a transaction the way they want, and to have Quicken "learn" and do it the same time they have a transaction from the same Payee. 

Yes, but I wanted to make sure people checked that first because this is an easy fix.  Also, to be specific, this doesn't work for people who import or convert from 2007 because 2007 didn't have that capability so from New Quicken's perspective all 2007 categories are user-defined. 

In regards to user-defined categories, Quicken remembers the last payee and category pair for every transaction and then uses that for future downloaded transactions.  I personally didn't know this wasn't working for people but our lead tester said he's aware of it but hasn't been able to reproduce it reliably.  Anyway, I don't think we would invest a lot of time in fixing old technology and would instead look forward to memorized transactions to fix this for people.

Am I confused or is there a discrepancy here? Aren't ALL transactions already "memorized"? Every time a transaction is entered, the Payee and related data (categorization, amount, memo, etc), the last entry is saved. Isn't the problem simply that QMac does not use that data for auto-categorization, etc? The ongoing discussion around this makes it sound like memorizing transactions is something new. 

And why can't the QM2007 migrated data also be used in the exact same way? Why is there a distinction? Isn't it all transaction data with payees, categories, amounts, memos, etc?

This whole discussion makes it sound like there are 2 (or more) parallel sets of data being maintained by QMac for ultimately the same purpose.

smayer97

Quicken Marcus said:

RCinNJ said:

Concordman said:

 This is how I understand it, by the way I welcome all comments from the Quicken folks if I am not reading this correctly.

What I have observed using the renaming rules is if I set the feature to the Quicken name  I am able to change existing and past transactions. New transactions require that I have to use the credit card statement name .

I played with this for a little while and observed that the name provided by your credit card statement will overrule what quicken thinks/ wants to use. Hope this helps

This confuses me. Are you saying that after I change the name to what I want for a recurring download, future downloads will use the words from the FI? If this is the case I don't see the point in changing anything. I feel I must be misunderstanding something.

The way renaming rules work is that you can use either the Quicken Name or the Statement Name to define the rule.  Both work on downloading a transaction.  The difference is that the Quicken Name is more restrictive in that the entire Quicken Name is used to trigger the renaming.  For a Statement Name you can define portions of the name to use in the rule so you have more flexibility.   The Statement Name is the name that the bank gives the transaction and is usually quite convoluted and long sometimes spanning both the Payee Name and Memo fields.  The Quicken Name is typically the nice name that our aggregation service gives it but they don't always do a good job and they will sometimes fall back on the crazy statement name.  In any case, all rules are applied to new downloaded transactions.

Please clarify what 'Quicken Name' and 'Statement Name' are and where they come from.

smayer97

Quicken Marcus said:

Tom Anderson said:

> @Quicken Marcus said:
> (Quote)
> Tom, can you describe in more detail about what you're doing?  Are you trying to edit the instance, the transaction or the scheduled transaction model?  We never allowed one to edit the instance before so this is new.  In beta, we noticed a number of people got confused between the instance and the transaction and I think this may be the case you're running into.  What you want to do to mirror previous behavior is to simply click the Mark As Paid button on the mini-toolbar to convert the scheduled transaction instance into a transaction.  Once it's a regular transaction you can work with it like any transaction.  Click details and edit splits.

Scheduled transaction - wanting to NOT FLAG as PAID to make changes on the NEXT transaction but to change some, but not all, of the splits AND have the total adjust for any differences, i.e. (sum of all splits yields transaction amount) Why do I have to mark as paid and then get to make changes - when in point of fact the transaction has yet to be completed (prior to scheduled date.) Having to mark as paid is a crutch for lousy (or lazy) programming and was not necessary in previous versions.

Tom, you could never edit the next instance in previous versions.  We didn't have that capability.  This is new in 5.12.  If you didn't Mark the transaction as Paid then you must have been editing the Scheduled Transaction Model which affects all future scheduled transactions.  You can still do this by clicking on Edit All Instances and then clicking on the Splits button. Because of the confusion between editing the instance and editing the model, we decided to make the experience different so customers wouldn't get confused between the 2.  Since editing the model is more rare, we decided to move that into a sheet so it's harder to accidentally edit the model.  Editing the instance is done in the register.  I think the other issue customers are expressing is that they want to edit more fields of the instance than just the Date and Amount like the splits. This makes sense but isn't currently supported primarily because Quicken Windows and the Quicken Cloud don't support it. So in summary, to work with Quicken Mac in the same way you used to requires a slightly different path but isn't that different. 1) Double Click on scheduled instance. 2) Click on Edit All Instances 3) Click on Splits.

The algorithm for editing the first occurrence is simply 3 steps:

1. duplicate the scheduled transaction, stripping any re-occurrence info
2. allow editing the first instance (in a familiar format, e.g. register entry)
3. once saved, advance the recurring scheduled transaction to the next occurrence date.

To preserve the look but yet not create confusion, all that would have been needed is that at step 2 simply present a dialogue box advising of what is being edited OR simply add a different TITLE to the editing window. This way, there is no need to "... make the experience different so customers wouldn't get confused between the 2..." After all, users are clicking on what action they want.

But that is just how I would have programmed it. Anything else is just going overboard and introduces its own set of issues. (but now that it is done, I highly doubt it will ever be changed; too much time invested at this point, with too many other priorities).

RCinNJ

Quicken Marcus said:

Under-the-hood there is a code assigned to that category which allows auto-categorization to work so even if you've change the name it will continue to work.  But it won't work if you delete it.  Just a suggestion until we have memorized transactions.

Marcus, I had no idea these category names are programmed under-the-hood and changing the name and location would not dissociate them from the underlying code. I've probably missed it, but I've never seen this explained before. If I'd known this years ago when QM first started working this way (or when I converted from QM 2007 to 2015) I would have done this. I've never seen this explained for anyone converting from 2007. Years late hearing this! Just another example of the problems caused by having no documentation and getting information piecemeal in this Forum. 

Question: what is to prevent me from renaming a Quicken category and moving it to match a category name & location I currently use & prefer? I'm guessing there are unintended consequences?

Dennis@1

> @jacobs said:
> (Quote)
> @Dennis Note that Marcus didn't say it will learn -- because it doesn't. It's not designed to. That's the flaw currently. If you turn on the checkbox, it will categorize based on whatever crowdsourced data and algorithms the back-end server comes up with. If it picks something wrong, it will be wrong every time. This is why Quicken needs to allow user to memorize transacitons they have manually categorized and then use that "rule" to apply to future transacitons from the same Payee.

OK. If I were to uncheck the box, will it at least use the previous instance of that payee to categorize? Even that would eliminate most of my problems with auto categorization.

jacobs

@Dennis I think from what Marcus wrote above, it should work that way, but it currently doesn't… or doesn't in all cases.

jacobs

willi said:

@Jacob

"Is there a way to have a category that has previously been chosen in error but now shows up as one of the 3 options to pick from, in your example, so it doesn't show up again?"

Thanks, Jacob. I was asking about way to remove 'mistakes' from the suggested list based on latest transactions, as I have one particular person that screws up continually, and I thought perhaps I could delete the wrong ones thereby cutting down on mistakes in future, thereby saving my sanity. LOL

@willi I think you are misunderstanding the conversation in this long thread. What Marcus described as the three cases is how he expects a future feature to work, not something that currently exists today. And since the list would include the most-recently used category and the most-frequently used category, that should be enough to get it right most of the time and preserve your sanity. But not until this feature is developed and released!

jacobs

Quicken Marcus said:

Don Awalt said:

@Quicken Marcus have the BoughtX and SoldX transaction types been implemented in Mac, or at least will they convert properly if migrating from QWin?

We have not added the boughtx or soldx types from Quicken Windows but I thought we converted better than you described since this can be represented by 2 separate transactions - one for the buy and the other for the transfer.  Are your accounts single-mutual fund accounts or a 401K account without cash?  It's possible we may have problems with these types of accounts on import but I don't know specifically.

@Quicken Marcus From what would-be Windows converters have reported here, I have been under the impression that BoughtX and SoldX transactions do not work in the Windows conversion. As you suggest, I was always puzzled why the converter didn't simply convert them into two transactions. In any case, you should be aware that there have been lots of complaints, and many users who simply cannot convert from Windows, because these transaction types aren't converted correctly.

jacobs

Quicken Marcus said:

jacobs said:

Quicken Marcus said:

For auto-categorization issues, customers should look in Preferences : Connected Services and make sure the "Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories" checkbox is checked.  If it's not checked, we don't do auto-categorization. 

But that only works with Quicken's pre-defined categories, right? It seems what many users expect, or want, is to be able to categorize a transaction the way they want, and to have Quicken "learn" and do it the same time they have a transaction from the same Payee. 

Yes, but I wanted to make sure people checked that first because this is an easy fix.  Also, to be specific, this doesn't work for people who import or convert from 2007 because 2007 didn't have that capability so from New Quicken's perspective all 2007 categories are user-defined. 

@Quicken Marcus So Quicken 2007 converters have basically no path forward to ever get their categorizations to work? I thought that Quicken 2019 would use one of its default categories, and if the user changed it to one of their old Quicken 2007 categories, then on the next download for the same Payee, Quicken would use the category of the most recent transaction, even if that was a Quicken 2007 category. So user would basically need to "correct" Quicken's auto-categorization once, and then Quicken would use that saved categorization going forward. Are you saying this isn't the case?

Related question… This would be tedious, but would it work to merge a Quicken 2007 category into a Quicken 2019 category, then rename that Quicken 2019 category to the old Quicken 2007 name? Again, it would be tedious to do this for 50 or 75 categories, but most users probably don't have that many custom categories -- and even it they did, they might be willing to invest the time to do the merge + rename if that meant their transactions would then auto-categorize correctly in th future. So I'm just wondering if you can confirm whether that process would work?

Quicken Marcus said:

In regards to user-defined categories, Quicken remembers the last payee and category pair for every transaction and then uses that for future downloaded transactions.  I personally didn't know this wasn't working for people but our lead tester said he's aware of it but hasn't been able to reproduce it reliably.  Anyway, I don't think we would invest a lot of time in fixing old technology and would instead look forward to memorized transactions to fix this for people.

Wow! The complaints about auto-categorization on this forum are so thick you need a weed-whacker to cut through them! Many, many people report all their transactions come in uncategorized, and many, many users report that even after they select a category, Quicken doesn't use that category the next time. I believe this is probably the Number One complaint on this forum about Quicken Mac.

If the new memorized transactions approach is somewhat close to being finished, then I'd possibly understand punting on the bug that has been preventing auto-categorization from working correctly since last fall -- but if the memorized transaction functionality is still along way off in the future, then fixing this bug would seem to me to be a high priority. 

Can you also clarify the sequence or hierarchy of auto-categorization processes currently:
a) If a user downloads a transaction for a Payee which exists, Quicken should use the category used for the most-recent transaction for this Payee. (although we believe this is broken in some or all instances for some or all users)
b) If a downloaded Payee doesn't exist, if the preference is set for auto-categorization, Quicken should use it's server-based matching to try to guess a category; if that preference is turned off, no attempt is made to auto-categorize.

Thanks for helping us understand how it works (or how it should work).

jscottfras

Scheduled Payments are broken on the year boundary. Scheduled a payment to my account every two weeks on Friday starting on 8/30/2019. This works fine until the end of December, but in January, the first payment is missing. It skips the 1/3/2020 entry.

I see now that this was already reported, but no way to delete my entry.

smayer97

RCinNJ said:

Quicken Marcus said:

Under-the-hood there is a code assigned to that category which allows auto-categorization to work so even if you've change the name it will continue to work.  But it won't work if you delete it.  Just a suggestion until we have memorized transactions.

Marcus, I had no idea these category names are programmed under-the-hood and changing the name and location would not dissociate them from the underlying code. I've probably missed it, but I've never seen this explained before. If I'd known this years ago when QM first started working this way (or when I converted from QM 2007 to 2015) I would have done this. I've never seen this explained for anyone converting from 2007. Years late hearing this! Just another example of the problems caused by having no documentation and getting information piecemeal in this Forum. 

Question: what is to prevent me from renaming a Quicken category and moving it to match a category name & location I currently use & prefer? I'm guessing there are unintended consequences?

Yes, one of the BIG problems with understanding any of this is the lack of documentation, and better yet, notification of changes or design decisions to first understand what is and what isn't, then to figure out what potential take action might be necessary to adjust.

Ideally, any design changes should either be self-evident or transparently and automatically make changes to user data to accommodate these changes. Otherwise, there is no true migration path and at the very least users are left in the dark as to why things are not working as would otherwise be expected. 

Even the ongoing discussion here is making it very hard to figure out what is and is not in the current design and what if anything a user ought to do, and even what will be in future the design.

I think there needs to be a good summary presented to delineate all these thoughts about auto-categorization, so-called memorization (which has always been but I think terms might be being re-used with different meaning), event triggers, etc. And anything in a release version should have this documented for reference, not just in this forum. This is not the best place for it in the end.

Shing

> @smayer97 said:
> (Quote)
> Yes, one of the BIG problems with understanding any of this is the lack of documentation, and better yet, notification of changes or design decisions to first understand what is and what isn't, then to figure out what potential take action might be necessary to adjust.
>
> Ideally, any design changes should either be self-evident or transparently and automatically make changes to user data to accommodate these changes. Otherwise, there is no true migration path and at the very least users are left in the dark as to why things are not working as would otherwise be expected. 
>
> Even the ongoing discussion here is making it very hard to figure out what is and is not in the current design and what if anything a user ought to do, and even what will be in future the design.
>
> I think there needs to be a good summary presented to delineate all these thoughts about auto-categorization, so-called memorization (which has always been but I think terms might be being re-used with different meaning), event triggers, etc. And anything in a release version should have this documented for reference, not just in this forum. This is not the best place for it in the end.

Agree with @smayer97. Written documentation would help everyone understand this and set a baseline for future discussion and enhancement suggestions.

smayer97

jacobs said:

Quicken Marcus said:

jacobs said:

Quicken Marcus said:

For auto-categorization issues, customers should look in Preferences : Connected Services and make sure the "Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories" checkbox is checked.  If it's not checked, we don't do auto-categorization. 

But that only works with Quicken's pre-defined categories, right? It seems what many users expect, or want, is to be able to categorize a transaction the way they want, and to have Quicken "learn" and do it the same time they have a transaction from the same Payee. 

Yes, but I wanted to make sure people checked that first because this is an easy fix.  Also, to be specific, this doesn't work for people who import or convert from 2007 because 2007 didn't have that capability so from New Quicken's perspective all 2007 categories are user-defined. 

@Quicken Marcus So Quicken 2007 converters have basically no path forward to ever get their categorizations to work?
...

Quicken Marcus said:

In regards to user-defined categories, Quicken remembers the last payee and category pair for every transaction and then uses that for future downloaded transactions.  I personally didn't know this wasn't working for people but our lead tester said he's aware of it but hasn't been able to reproduce it reliably.  Anyway, I don't think we would invest a lot of time in fixing old technology and would instead look forward to memorized transactions to fix this for people.

Wow! The complaints about auto-categorization on this forum are so thick you need a weed-whacker to cut through them! ...

I like that descriptor!  

What all this discussion shows is how much there appears to be a big disconnect between what users are experiencing and expecting and what developers are seeing and understanding. 

I think there needs to be some kind of reset take place to better explain the ins-and-outs in a clear, concise user-friendly way, with documentation to refer back to.

There seem to be a lot of background activity in QMac that few users, if any, fully understand.

jacobs

@Quicken Marcus You indicated that you weren't aware that there's much of a problem with users getting uncategorized or mis-categorized transactions until I raised it earlier in this thread. It's a massive problem frustrating many Quicken users who are frustrated and angry. Here's just a sampling of threads of users complaining about this recently:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7860066/quicken-not-remembering-name-category

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20028816/#Comment_20028816

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7859639/why-are-downloaded-transactions-uncategorized-that-formerly-were-categorized-correctly

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7859538/new-subscription-service-has-taken-away-important-memorized-transaction-feature

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7859475/how-do-i-teach-quicken-for-mac-to-remember-a-category-for-a-payee-that-i-frequently-use-each-month

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7859422/why-doesnt-the-latest-version-memorize-payees-with-their-categories

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7859324/renaming-rules-applying-to-category-as-well-q-mac

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7859117/category-auto-fill-not-working-quicken-for-mac-5-12-2

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7859038/still-not-memorizing-categories

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7707696/mac-2018-not-memorized

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7859034/when-are-you-going-to-fix-memorized-transactions-so-they-remember-categories

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7858901/when-will-quicken-for-mac-memorize-transactions

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7857190/how-do-i-teach-quicken-for-mac-to-remember-a-category-for-different-payees

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7858056/learning-categories

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7857662/not-correctly-populating-categories-on-downloads

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7857178/why-doesnt-quicken-mac-deluxe-subscription-automatically-enter-categories

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7857125/what-is-the-status-outlook-for-transaction-categorization-resolution-in-quicken-mac-5-11-1

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7855485/quicken-not-remembering-name-category-q-mac

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7852899/mac-categorization-edited


This is by no means an inclusive list, just ones that popped out as I quickly scrolled back through the past couple of months. Believe me that there are dozens more going back to when things broke in one of the updates last fall, and doubtless many additional people don't post if they search here first and see the questions already asked and answered.

smayer97

@jacobs Nice! Like I said, seems like a disconnect.

Maybe it would be better if a developer spent some time actually monitoring these forums rather than just relying on mods to pass on info (no offence to the mods intended). This might give a better picture of what users experience in real-world usage.

Chris27

Having migrated to Mac from Windows a couple of months ago I could not be happier. Bought a 27" iMac. Should have did this a long time ago - that's a different story for a different day. Migrating all my data over was some work as you can imagine. All is in good order now and working flawlessly.

Of all my current apps, Quicken has been the most underwhelming! Nothing but headaches, and too many instances of applying workarounds and having to live with it till the devs get around to it. Meanwhile, I am paying the full price!

The inability to create certain banking reports in an industry standard format is inexcusable. Leads me to wonder how many devs have real world financial experience!

Great forum, great bunch of mods, and quite informative. Like it has been said, Q should be analyzing the forum and applying it in development.

I am due for renewal in a month, I am clenching my teeth!