Automatic Transaction Match - A disaster waiting to happen? (Q Mac)

Question

Hi again Quicken Community,

I downloaded transactions from my Bank.  When sorting through them I noticed a manually entered Check Pay transaction from the other day had a Statement Payee in the form that my bank uses.  This couldn't be because I don't enter a Statement Payee when manually entered transactions.  Furthermore, the Payee was a completely different entity than the one in the Statement Payee.  I checked my Rules and confirmed that there was no such rule.  I right-clicked on the transaction and found an item called Reject Automatic Transaction Match, so I selected it and the issues was resolved.  Well, this specific instance was resolved but Automatic Transaction Match should either go away or provide some kind of indicator that a transaction was affected by it.

Ploooplooo · Answer

Hi @John_in_NC , Thanks for your perspective.  I'm pretty sure that the Status column would only have helped me if I noticed (and remembered) that the previously manually entered Bill Pay was now replaced by a downloaded and matched transaction.  I believe I eventually would have picked it up in a reconciliation, but I don't like that this happened automatically without a notable flag or notification.

John_in_NC · Answer

While this won't help with mismatched transactions, there is a status indicator to help you out.

Make sure you have the "Status" column displayed (it will have a dot as the header), and various icons will populate that field. Orange pencils=manually entered, Blue Pencils=manually entered and matched to a downloaded transaction, and a blue dot means simply downloaded. There are other icons for Bill Pay and scheduled transactions, but that doesn't matter here.

The only thing that is odd about your post is that (even if your transaction is somehow mismatched), the name/category you manually entered takes precedence over what was downloaded. So, if you typed something in, that should remain. (A few things such as the Amount and transaction date, however, will override your entry, with the latter being a preference option as to which date to keep when matched.)