How can I get Payees correctly filled in on transaction download

spuchacz94

For all POS Debit - DDA downloaded transaction, Quicken just remembers one payee and whenever I change the payee it wants to credit or update its rule. If Quicken would just look farther down the memo field after POS Debit - DDA, it would find the correct payee. Below is an example.
POS Debit - DDA H-E-B #735 POS DEB 1536 09/16/20 00000021 MARBLE
The payee should be identified as HEB.
Any ideas on how to fix this?

Rich_M

Renaming rules can be tricky and require ongoing maintenance to keep them working correctly, as identifiers in the memo field may change. 

In this example I would just code "POS Debit H-E-B" to get Quicken to rename the payee to HEB, all the other information in the field is extraneous. 

You only need to code the minimum keywords that will uniquely identify this payee in the order they will appear in the memo field. 

Hope that helps. 

spuchacz94

Thanks, but shouldn't the Quicken application be smart enough to recognize this when creating rules. Quicken before they went private was much better at identifying payees.

splasher

As suggested by Rich_M, create one manually.

I would even go so far as to make it look for only "H-E-B".

If you allow Quicken to create one on its own, it is liable to include some of the numbers at the end that may change with each transaction and therefore never match up.

Personally, I never rely on Quicken to create a Renaming Rule, I do them all manually and I never have an issue with any of them.

Rich_M

@spuchacz94 Sometimes human intervention is required.  

Chris_QPW

Quicken's guess for the payee are given the lowest priority, because it is just that, a guess.

And as such if you want Quicken to guess you have to understand in what order the different options/rules are processed.

If there is an existing renaming rule that matches that is what you are going to get.

If a renaming rule doesn't exist and you have this option on it will put in its guess:
Edit -> Preferences -> Downloaded Transactions -> Automatically apply Quicken's suggested name to payee

Once that guess kicks in then this option on the same page also applies if you have it set:
Automatically create rules when I rename payees

So you end up with a renaming rule, and the next time you get such a transaction that renaming rule is going to be used instead of the guess.  Now what should the renaming be so that it is sure to match this payee with all that garbage in it?
Well that is yet another guess.

So you have just layered two Quicken guesses on top of each other.

And if you throw in automatic categorization, you have yet another guess for that.

And Quicken isn't using some kind of AI with a massive database to decide this.
They do use a database of different vendors though.  I'm not sure if they use the memo for the guess, renaming rules do look at both the payee and memo.

For instance here some examples.


So as you can see from above Quicken's guesses aren't totally without merit.

But what is worth much more is having a credit card company that doesn't do stupid things like putting the most important information at the end of the memo.

spuchacz94

Thanks. I don't know what the providers of transactions are delivering. I just know for POS Debit - DDA transaction, in the memo field of the transaction after POS Debit - DDA. the payee is clearly visible.

splasher

spuchacz94 said:

Thanks. I don't know what the providers of transactions are delivering. I just know for POS Debit - DDA transaction, in the memo field of the transaction after POS Debit - DDA. the payee is clearly visible.

And you should manually setup a renaming rule like this:



I don't know what DDA stands for, so I made up a suitable Payee.  While Quicken shows "payee contains", it combines payee & memo in the text that it searches.

I have several like this, WalMart being a prime example, they come up with different payees for different registers and typically include the store # which I don't want, so I turn all of their varying payee versions into a consistent "Wal-Mart".