When are you going to fix memorized transactions so they remember categories?

Bob Wargowski

When Are you going to fix memorized transactions so they remember categories? There have been a number of releases since this problem started happening.

jacobs

@Bob Wargowski Actually, your question/complaint was straightforward and on point. smayer97 was nitpicking about nomenclature, but the gist is clear to anyone who is dealing with or following this issue. In my reply below your original question, #3 was directly addressing that this should be working, but isn't. And it's causing a lot of users confusion and extra work.

Here's what the product manager said about this in another thread:

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.

This is problematic to me on multiple counts.

(1) This is probably the number one complaint about Quicken Mac at this point in time, so it's surprising or disappointing the product manager wasn't aware of it. In that other thread, I compiled a list of about a dozen threads complaining about this same issue.

(2) If the leader tester can't reproduce it, but lots of people are reporting it, then there should be a process or reaching out to some of the users complaining about this to obtains copies of their files, or go through screens with them, so they can see exactly what is happening, and then hopefully track t down and fix it.

(3) While I understand that they're in the process or writing new code to manage memorized transactions, and don't want to invest a lot of time on code they're going to rip out, I believe that unless the new stuff is ready to release in the near future -- and reading between the lines, I'd say it isn't -- then they should owe it to users to at least fix the bug that's preventing Quicken from working the way it should be working currently.

You might want to pop over to that other thread and add your comments about this, addressing them to: @ sign, quote, Quicken Marcus, quote -- there's no guarantee he'll read all the comments in that now-long thread, but it's probably the best way for users to try to impart to the product manager how broken this is and how much a fix is needed. (It's less likely he'll find and read this thread.)

jacobs

@Bob Wargowski There's a been a lot of conversation about this over the past week among several of us users and the Quicken Mac product manager in the long thread about the release of version 5.12 (starting here and continuing on and off through that thread). If you don't feel like wading through all those posts, I think this is an accurate summary:

1. There is a plan the developers have for adding functionality similar to Quicken Windows or Quicken Mac 2007 to allow users to memorize transactions for Payees that will be used for subsequent transactions from the same Payee.
2. There is no timeframe the Product Manager is willing to share at this time about that functionality. My guess -- only a guess -- is that this means it's in development, but release is not imminent; think 3-6 months, not the next 1 or 2.
3. Meanwhile, downloads should pick up the category used for the same Payee the last time that Payee was used, but this is broken in at least some instances, and perhaps more than they were aware. Since this aspect of the program is being re-worked, it's uncertain whether they will expend effort to troubleshoot what's currently not working and fix it.

Bottom line: this will get fixed, either in stages or all at once, but we have no estimate of when that will happen.

smayer97

I think the language needs to be more precise. Since QMac DOES actually memorize transactions, with its categorization and other data, the problem maybe simply ought to be called auto-categorization based on memorized transactions (I know, a little long), or simply applying memorized categorization (though there are other data that needs to be applied too, e.g. amount, memo).

Bob Wargowski

Thanks for your replies. Sorry the question was not as precise as it needed to be. My complaint is that applying previously used categories to downloaded transactions with the same payee was working fine in older versions before I paid for the subscription service. It is obviously a bug. I don't understand why it has to go through a whole product development lifecycle to get fixed. To me, it was a major ease of use feature.

jacobs

@Bob Wargowski Actually, your question/complaint was straightforward and on point. smayer97 was nitpicking about nomenclature, but the gist is clear to anyone who is dealing with or following this issue. In my reply below your original question, #3 was directly addressing that this should be working, but isn't. And it's causing a lot of users confusion and extra work.

Here's what the product manager said about this in another thread:

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.

This is problematic to me on multiple counts.

(1) This is probably the number one complaint about Quicken Mac at this point in time, so it's surprising or disappointing the product manager wasn't aware of it. In that other thread, I compiled a list of about a dozen threads complaining about this same issue.

(2) If the leader tester can't reproduce it, but lots of people are reporting it, then there should be a process or reaching out to some of the users complaining about this to obtains copies of their files, or go through screens with them, so they can see exactly what is happening, and then hopefully track t down and fix it.

(3) While I understand that they're in the process or writing new code to manage memorized transactions, and don't want to invest a lot of time on code they're going to rip out, I believe that unless the new stuff is ready to release in the near future -- and reading between the lines, I'd say it isn't -- then they should owe it to users to at least fix the bug that's preventing Quicken from working the way it should be working currently.

You might want to pop over to that other thread and add your comments about this, addressing them to: @ sign, quote, Quicken Marcus, quote -- there's no guarantee he'll read all the comments in that now-long thread, but it's probably the best way for users to try to impart to the product manager how broken this is and how much a fix is needed. (It's less likely he'll find and read this thread.)