How to create a custom Quickfill Rule?

Dave461

Hey gang- I have a frequent merchant who uses Square to process my credit card. Square appears to assign a unique alphanumeric sequence to each and every transaction. Such that the Payee Name is unique for each transaction. i.e. SamplePayee3#$&% and SamplePayee*$@^ and SamplePayee%ey%$ etc.

As you can imagine this gives Quickfill fits since every occurrence appears to be unique and new to Quicken so I never get a match and the Category does not get assigned. I've tried to edit a Quickfill Rule such that it only looks for "SamplePayee" but Quicken refuses to Save that.

Anyone have a workaround? Thanks!

jacobs

@Dave461 You're hit upon what I consider to be a major weakness in Quicken Mac;'s implementation of creating Renaming rules. The text in the dialog box says "it statement payee contains…" but what you type to search for must be words, separated by a space or other delimiter characters.

In my quick testing just now, any of the following characters will break the search string into a separate word ("token" in the programmers' parlance): slash, backslash, period, comma, exclamation point, question mark, pipe, colon, semicolon, percent sign, dollar sign, m hashtag, at sign, tilde, caret, asterisk, parenthesis, bracket, apostrophe, quote, greater than or less than. There may be more.

So in your example above, if these are literal examples and not just random characters you typed, "SamplePayee%ey%$" and "SamplePayee%ey%$" should work, because Quicken creates the search word of "SamplePayee" -- and therefore should match that phrase. (If you these are real world examples, where you have a real for "SamplePayee" but it doesn't work, that would be very helpful to know to report to the developers.) But "SamplePayee3" leaves you out of luck, because numbers aren't delimiters for Quicken.

Interestingly, in the thread on this site about the release of version 6.1, several of us just had a discussion about this with the product manager for Quicken Mac. I questioned why "contains" doesn't simply look for the text provided anywhere in the Payee field (as if it had wildcards before and after). If that worked, you could search of "amplePaye" any it would match. He explained that the issue is the dang mobile app, which has to be compatible with both Quicken Mac and Quicken Windows. Quicken Windows implemented the keyword or token methodology, so the Mac developers were stuck needing to be compatible with that. But he said he'd look into whether there was anything more they could do to improve this in the Mac desktop product without breaking compatibility -- specifically making numbers delimiters too, so "SamplePayee" would be matchable.

EDITING to add: I posted your comment in that thread it the hope of it getting the eye of the product manager.

Dave461

Jacob-

Thank you so much for the reply- so at least I'm not totally crazy!

Here's the thing. In the Quickfill Rule editor, "SamplePayee" all by itself DOES work. i.e. in the resulting popup menu, that search does return all the transactions to date from that Square merchant.

The problem is that there is no way to Save that. Quicken insists on choosing one of the transactions in the popup menu, all of which are unique because of the random alphanumerics that are appended.

And there are so many more examples of this than just my Square merchants. I'm having the same issue creating a Quickfill Rule for Apple Pay merchants as well. Usually it's a unique transaction number that is appended, but the problem is the same.

And thank you for passing that along to the Developers!

Dave461

Hi again Jacob-

I do wish we could Edit our posts. But anyway, I think this is a different (but related?) issue to the Delimiters for Renaming rules. It's almost like there is something missing in the standard File dialog when Editing a Quickfill rule. I simply can't save the custom string I've entered i.e. "SamplePayee" even though there are no offending Delimiters. Frustrating!

jacobs

@Dave461  I'm a bit confused now. You're talking about QuickFill rules here. I thought you were talking about Renaming rules -- having Quicken change "SamplePayee%123" into "Sample Payee". Because if it does that successfully, and then applies a QuickFill rule, one QuickFill rule for "Sample Payee" should work for all transactions.

So I'm not clear whether you've created Renaming rules and they don't work as expected? Or you've created Renaming rules but they don't execute first before the QuickFill rule? Or you have no Renaming rules?

(Sorry, I'm not much help here because I've traditionally entered most of my transactions manually -- partly out of habit, partly because found that it took about as much time to edit categories and add splits, partly because renaming and QuickFill rules didn't exist until somewhat recently, and partly because of periodic connectivity issues -- as it did to just do things manually. That's just me; I'm not recommending this approach for others.)

jacobs

Dave461 said:

I think this is a different (but related?) issue to the Delimiters for Renaming rules. It's almost like there is something missing in the standard File dialog when Editing a Quickfill rule. I simply can't save the custom string I've entered i.e. "SamplePayee" even though there are no offending Delimiters.

For QuickFill rules, the Payee name you're selecting in the window is for an existing Payee in the database. Here, a wildcard-type entry wouldn't make sense; you're defining a rule for a specific, existing Payee.

So to my mind, the issue for you is whether you can get Renaming rules to correctly intercept and change the payee text string from your financial institution into a standardized Payee name in Quicken. And then use that Payee name for your QuickFill rule(s).

Dave461 said:

I do wish we could Edit our posts. 

You should be able to edit your post by clicking the little gear icon on the right side of the heading line of your post. My understanding is that new users get no editing privileges, and after you've gained "points" for using the platform for awhile, you gain "privileges" like being able to edit your posts. (They apparently do this to thwart scammers who were rampant on the previous platform Quicken used for this forum.)  I believe that at the first level, your ability to edit is available only for a short time after you post; then with higher privileges, you have a longer time where you can edit. I don't believe this is explained anywhere, unfortunately, so you discover these things by trial and error.

Dave461

Thanks again Jacob!

No worries- this is confusing to be sure. To be clear- talking strictly about Quickfill Rules in order to assign a Category to a Payee. I don't have any Renaming rules, but that's been on my list to tackle as well. I think I'll wait a bit!

Thank you for pointing out the Edit button. I'm an "old head" here, though with all the hosting site changes over the years I thought perhaps I'd gone back to square one. But yes now I see I do apparently have 24 hours of Edit ability.

Thanks again!

jacobs

@Dave461  Now I understand more fully, and you can't do what you want with a QuickFill rule alone. You're wanting a QuickFill rule to match against a string of text in the downloaded Payee name, but it doesn't work that way. A QuickFill rule is linked to a specific Payee already in your database. That's why it forces you to select a Payee when you create the rule.

But as I said, I think you can accomplish what you want if you have a Renaming rule to first standardize the various text strings that come from the credit card company into the name of a Payee in your database, and then let the QuickFill rule categorize the transaction.