Quicken not remembering name/category (Q Mac)

Avi Dee

This is a followup to https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7855485/quicken-not-remembering-name-category-q-mac which I asked three months ago. I was waiting for an update to Quicken; it hasn’t helped.

I regularly visit a restaurant called “Sticky’s Finger Joint”. It registers on my CC bill as “TST* STICKY S FINGER JOIN”. Every time I did a download it would show up as a payee “Fingers” with a category “Furnishings”, and I had to update it. I posted that other question.

I was told that an upcoming version of Quicken would have custom renaming rules. And the new version did! So I set up a renaming rule that says:

Rename to: Sticky’s Finger Joint
If: Statement name contains
Condition: [TST] [STICKY] [S] [FINGER] [JOIN]

That has solved the naming problem. However, the entries are *still* coming in as the category “Furnishings”. I disabled “Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories”. That didn’t help.

Seriously. Quicken can see literally dozens of entries with a statement payee name of “TST* STICKY S FINGER JOIN”. It can see that EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. I rename it and set a category. When it downloads a new statement entry, where in the world is it coming up with this bogus category? How can I make it stop wasting my time?

jacobs

In short: you can't fix this until they address categorization, which the project manager has said they are working on.

I get that it's frustrating. I've compiled a list of posts on this forum of users complaining about this issue to bring it to the attention of the product manager, and just added yours to the list. 

The big thing they're working on will allow users to memorize multiple transactions for a Payee and select the right one, which you can imagine being helpful for a Payee like Amazon or Home Depot where you might have used multiple categories in the past.

However, in the meantime, the product manager has asserted that "if a user changed the category for a particular payee in the past, Quicken remembers this and applies it the next time this payee is downloaded" -- which is exactly what you're saying is not happening. So I've been trying to bring this to his attention. I believe a bug was introduced in a previous update which is causing Quicken to use its crowd-sourced guess at categorization over the categorization of a previous instance of the Payee -- at least for some users in some situations.

jacobs

In short: you can't fix this until they address categorization, which the project manager has said they are working on.

I get that it's frustrating. I've compiled a list of posts on this forum of users complaining about this issue to bring it to the attention of the product manager, and just added yours to the list. 

The big thing they're working on will allow users to memorize multiple transactions for a Payee and select the right one, which you can imagine being helpful for a Payee like Amazon or Home Depot where you might have used multiple categories in the past.

However, in the meantime, the product manager has asserted that "if a user changed the category for a particular payee in the past, Quicken remembers this and applies it the next time this payee is downloaded" -- which is exactly what you're saying is not happening. So I've been trying to bring this to his attention. I believe a bug was introduced in a previous update which is causing Quicken to use its crowd-sourced guess at categorization over the categorization of a previous instance of the Payee -- at least for some users in some situations.

Avi Dee

My particular question is: Where is it getting this “Fingers”/“Furnishings”?!? I’ve turned off the “Automatically improve the quality” checkbox. I literally do not use the “Furnishings” category anywhere. I have never willingly used the “Furnishings” category.

There is a part of me that wants to go spelunking in my data file with a SQL browser and/or analyzing the Quicken code to figure out myself what’s going on.

Thanks for linking the thread. A part of me wonders how corrupt my Q19 file is because I upgraded from Q07, and will I continue to have problems forever because I’m an old customer.

jacobs

As I understand one of the replies from Marcus, we Quicken 2007 upgraders will be in better shape once they complete the work they are doing to create functionality around memorized transactions. In theory, it sounds like Quicken 2007, but better. But who knows… until we see the released product. Meanwhile, I continue to believe there's a bug in the code that is preventing Quicken 2019 from working as it's supposed to with existing Payees, and I'm hoping that might be a quicker thing for them to fix… if they figure out what's going on.