Split transactions showing up in Tag Column

Question

Why are my split categories (which are already categorized in their own respective categories) are also showing up in the "Tag" column in my register. I prefer not to have the categorized transaction not showing up in the "Tag" column, but remain in the "Category" column.  What can I do to turn this "option" off, if any.  Thank you...

Tom Young · Accepted Answer

I guess I can only respond to your literal words:"Why are my split categories (which are already categorized in their own 
respective categories) are also showing up in the "Tag" column in my 
register."So I guess the answer to my question is "No."

Boatnmaniac · Accepted Answer

I wish I had a better answer for you but I don't understand the rationale, either.  At least if Quicken were consistent in this approach you'd think we'd also be seeing "--Split--" in the Memo field but that's not the case.There are quite a few other quirky things in Quicken that make me raise my eyebrows but about which I can do nothing to change it.  So about the best advice I can give is to grin and bear it.

Boatnmaniac · Accepted Answer

You are welcome.You can post ideas for Quicken Community and/or Quicken improvement at https://community.quicken.com/categories/community-improvement-suggestions.  
Quicken folks do review this list.  I know because one suggestion I'd made about a year ago was for Quicken to automatically select which securities lots to sell (FIFO or LIFO) based upon the default set by users in their preferences.  That change was implemented within the last few months so now when we sell a security it will automatically use that method instead of us having to manually select it during the transaction acceptance process.

Chris_QPW · Accepted Answer

For what it is worth I think that the reason that the memo field behaves differently than the category and tag fields is that the internal data structure is "surfacing".

You see this kind of thing in certainly places in programs and certainly in Quicken.  For instance I would bet a lot that internally the database really does reused the category field for transfers.

The first guess is that internally there isn't a tag field.

Originally tags were entered like this:  category/tag.  And that still works everywhere in Quicken even when there isn't a tag field.  If you enter it like that Quicken will "push" the tag to the tag field, but it is my bet that is just for display purposes.  Most likely internally it has never changed.  You will see the same thing in a QIF file.  There is only one line for both categories and tags.

So now we only have one real internal field "category/tag".  And it is again my bet that when you split the transaction they reuse the field as a pointer to the split data.

Note again the QIF format tends to bear this out.  There is a field for the main memo, and fields for a memo on every split line.