Why do I see eight (8) entries of payment to "Progressive," the auto insurance company.

pb4072

I have no auto policy with Progressive. And, "Progressive" does not show anywhere in my bank checking account on the web.  So, why am I seeing eight (8) entries for it here in Quicken?

jacobs

Click on one of those transactions, and then Show the Transaction Inspector (on the View menu). Look at the bottom section labeled "From your Financial Institution". Does the Statement Payee say something other than Progressive, and if so, does it give you any indication of what the actual transaction might have been? Or can you identify from the transaction amounts in Quicken and the transaction amounts on your banks website what these transactions are? Sometimes Quicken's attempts to "clean up" Payee names can do funky things. (There's a way around that, if it turns out to be these case, but I don't want to go down that road yet.)

jacobs

Great! Glad you got it cleared up. If you find you're getting a lot of nonsensical Payee names, you might want to experiment with a setting in Quicken Preferences > Connected Services. Try unchecking the checkbox for "Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories" to see if your downloads are better or worse.

What happens is that Quicken runs your transactions through something of an artificial intelligence server to try to replace sometimes cryptic Payee names with cleaner ones, as well as a server that attempts to auto-categorize transactions -- both based on anonymized crowd-sourced data. Sometimes this works great. Replacing "ABCBank Store #4321" and "ABCBank Store #5432" with "ABC Bank" is helpful. Replacing it with "Progressive" is obviously not!

jacobs

Click on one of those transactions, and then Show the Transaction Inspector (on the View menu). Look at the bottom section labeled "From your Financial Institution". Does the Statement Payee say something other than Progressive, and if so, does it give you any indication of what the actual transaction might have been? Or can you identify from the transaction amounts in Quicken and the transaction amounts on your banks website what these transactions are? Sometimes Quicken's attempts to "clean up" Payee names can do funky things. (There's a way around that, if it turns out to be these case, but I don't want to go down that road yet.)

pb4072

Thanks. Yes. That does the trick for me. "Progressive" is actually a political donation for ActBlue. Weird, very weird. But, as long as I can "inspect" it, that's cool. Thanks a lot!

Rocket J Squirrel

ActBlue sends these strings in the payee names. You probably donated to some cause with the word "Progressive" in its name via ActBlue. E.g., "Progressive America", "Progressive Principles PAC", etc.

jacobs

Great! Glad you got it cleared up. If you find you're getting a lot of nonsensical Payee names, you might want to experiment with a setting in Quicken Preferences > Connected Services. Try unchecking the checkbox for "Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories" to see if your downloads are better or worse.

What happens is that Quicken runs your transactions through something of an artificial intelligence server to try to replace sometimes cryptic Payee names with cleaner ones, as well as a server that attempts to auto-categorize transactions -- both based on anonymized crowd-sourced data. Sometimes this works great. Replacing "ABCBank Store #4321" and "ABCBank Store #5432" with "ABC Bank" is helpful. Replacing it with "Progressive" is obviously not!

pb4072

I did that in Preferences. We'll see. I wonder what other jewels it changed for me in there.

Cheers, and thanks.