Bill and Income Reminders suggests similar transactions [edited]

StevenKB

I'm running Quicken Deluxe Personal on Windows 10. I bit the bullet and bought the online subscription thing because I wanted to be able to download transactions for my credit card. Ok, that works, but the rest of the software is no improvement over the old version I had, and in one area in particular it is very frustrating/disappointing.

 "Bill and Income Reminders" lists for me the bill and income reminders I entered. So far, so good. But when I click "Enter" on some of the reminders (a few transfers are the worst), it pops up this little window that asks me "Is this the reminder for [whatever]?" At first I fell for it and clicked "Yes". Cha-Ching! A transaction was entered into my register. But wait! The reminder was still there in the reminders list! It was some other transaction that went into my register!

 WHY ON EARTH DOES THE QUICKEN SOFTWARE TRY TO DECIDE IF IT'S SOME "SIMILAR" TRANASCTION WHEN I CLICK "ENTER" FROM THE REMINDERS LIST???!!!

When I click "Enter" on the Reminders list, THAT is the transaction I want to enter! Don't go looking for some other transaction, Quicken!!! These transfer transactions are the WORST, too! I have to hold "N" on my keyboard for 5 seconds while it auto repeats through all the "Is this the...?" windows before it finally gets to the window that allows me to ACTUALLY ENTER THE TRANSACTION FOR THE REMINDER I CLICKED ON IN THE FIRST PLACE. It is REALLY bad.

Chris_QPW

You are mentioning transfers so I will go to that one first.

Edit -> Preferences -> Transfer detection

Here you can choose to completely turn off this option if you like.  It sounds like you have confirm on, and you should have at least that on, certainly you should never have automatically create the transfers on.  What is happening here is Quicken is make a guess at two transactions being two sides of a transfer.  It is pure guess based on them having the same amount (one deposit and one withdraw) around the same date.

Another place Quicken makes "suggestions" is in the reminders.

Ctrl+J -> Options -> Suggest Reminders (and I suggest you turn both of these options off)

And last there is one more possible "suggestion" that Quicken does with reminders.

Say you have a reminder to pay your credit card as a transfer and it is set to 5/20, but on 5/18 you get the actual payment transaction.  Quicken is trying to be "nice" and guess that the 5/20 reminder lines up with the 5/18 payment and as such is asking if the payment is for that reminder.  If you say no the reminder is left alone.  If you say yes it is going to combine the two as if the reminder was already in the register and matched.

There isn't any way to turn off this "suggestion", but there are things you can do to make it so that it doesn't come up.  One is to make sure your reminders are set to get into the register before the payment shows up.  The other is to use unique names for your reminder payee since it seems to base the guess somewhat on the payee name.

BTW none of this is new to the Subscription version.

StevenKB

Chris_QPW: Thank you for your in-depth reply. I can tell you, the behavior I'm hating IS new to the new version. As a programmer, I can see little logic to the behavior. I have clicked "Enter" on a Reminder. It should be obvious that that is the transaction I mean to enter. I chose it for entry! Why should the software go about guessing that I might have some other intentions?

I can understand it if I'm typing a transaction into the register. My old Quicken version would hunt through the reminders and sometimes ask "Is the the [blah blah] reminder?" That was useful. That made sense. I believe this is the 3rd case you describe above. But my current issue, where I'm choosing one of the reminders to Enter, does not make sense. I've chosen the very reminder I want to enter! Don't second guess me, Quicken!

I'm not venting at you, Chris_QPW. I will try the things you suggested, and I really appreciate your time in typing them up.

StevenKB

Chris_QPW: I actually think I tried most of the things you suggested from a previous hunt. I won't know for a week whether it's any better, but I suspect not. :-(

Chris_QPW

One thing I can suggest is grabbing a screenshot of the dialogs, that will at least pin it down a bit more of what "guessing" they are doing, and then someone might know a way to turn it off.

It is very possible that I have never seen what you are talking about and as such all my ideas pertain to other things.  I can't think of any time Quicken has asked me a question when entering the reminder itself.