Matching downloaded transaction changed category to "Uncategorized"

Scott Rose

Hi there,

I manually entered a transaction into one of my credit card registers with all the information that I needed: date, payee, category, amount, and memo.

A few days later, I chose "Update All Online Accounts", and Quicken downloaded my credit card transactions into Quicken.

Quicken correctly & automatically matched one of the downloaded transactions to this manual transaction, so I got the "blue pencil icon" next to this transaction. 

Quicken matched the transactions correctly.

However, Quicken wiped out the category that I had previously typed for this transaction, and it replaced it with "Uncategorized".

Ideally, I would like Quicken to retain the category that I manually type in for my transactions, whenever Quicken successfully matches transactions.

Is this a bug? Is there a way for me to prevent this from happening in the future?

Thanks!  

p.s. How does Quicken know how to match correctly? Is it a combination of date & amount?

John_in_NC

Hi, Scott:

For starters, make sure you are running the latest version of Quicken for Mac.

Manually entered transactions that are matched to downloads should retain all of your data, except for the amount (which the download will override). Also, the data can change depending on your preference setting (posted, or the date you entered.) But, it should not become uncategorized for matched transactions.

If it were I, I would correct those errant transactions and make a backup. Then go into Preferences:Connected Services and choose the option to reset cloud data. Sometimes when this gets out of sync, it can cause strange behavior such as categories suddenly becoming uncategorized. Your desktop data is untouched, and a fresh copy will be uploaded.

As far as the matching: Quicken uses a bunch of proprietary algorithms to decide whether or not to match. We really don't know the exact rules, but it dates entered, amount, payee, etc. all come into play.