ATT-Mobile gets imported from AMEX as payee "T-Mobile" in Quicken (Q Mac)

Bill@h

Hello, I'm new here.

I have Quicken for Mac v 6.11 w/ Active Subscription

When I do my import from AMEX using Quicken Connect method - Transactions marked as "ATT-Mobile" on my AMEX portal, wind up with the Payee named "T-Mobile" in Quicken. I manually have to correct it in quicken.

Is there a way to have quicken correct this automatically?

Thank you in advance.
-bh

John_in_NC

Howdy, Bill,

This is likely being renamed upstream from you. You could look at renaming rules (Window:Payees & Rules, and click on Renaming Rules button) to setup a rule to rename at each import.

That said, at&t Mobile sounds like a monthly cell phone bill, so I suggest you look into setting this as a scheduled transaction (aka Bill Reminder). You can find that under Transactions: New Scheduled Transactions. 

You don't have to set this up as an eBill; you still can set this up manually (scheduled transaction) and have your download mark it as paid when downloaded from AMEX. I prefer control, so I don't use eBills.

jacobs

To amplify the first point of John's post: this is exactly what Renaming Rules are for -- spotting an incoming name and changing it to what you prefer.

First, select one of these transactions in your register and do View > Inspector. What you're interested in here is the "Statement Payee" near the bottom. This is exactly what is coming from your financial institution before Quicken starts trying to "help" you by doing any automatic renaming.

Now, go to Window > Payees & Rules and click on the Renaming Rules tab. Click the + icon to create a new rule. For "if statement name contains", enter all or part of the statement payee as it appeared in the Inspector window. Then for Set Payee Name To, enter the Payee name as you want to see it in Quicken.

John_in_NC

Howdy, Bill,

This is likely being renamed upstream from you. You could look at renaming rules (Window:Payees & Rules, and click on Renaming Rules button) to setup a rule to rename at each import.

That said, at&t Mobile sounds like a monthly cell phone bill, so I suggest you look into setting this as a scheduled transaction (aka Bill Reminder). You can find that under Transactions: New Scheduled Transactions. 

You don't have to set this up as an eBill; you still can set this up manually (scheduled transaction) and have your download mark it as paid when downloaded from AMEX. I prefer control, so I don't use eBills.

jacobs

To amplify the first point of John's post: this is exactly what Renaming Rules are for -- spotting an incoming name and changing it to what you prefer.

First, select one of these transactions in your register and do View > Inspector. What you're interested in here is the "Statement Payee" near the bottom. This is exactly what is coming from your financial institution before Quicken starts trying to "help" you by doing any automatic renaming.

Now, go to Window > Payees & Rules and click on the Renaming Rules tab. Click the + icon to create a new rule. For "if statement name contains", enter all or part of the statement payee as it appeared in the Inspector window. Then for Set Payee Name To, enter the Payee name as you want to see it in Quicken.

Bill@h

Thank you, you guys were very helpful, I managed to rename the offending imports as needed. Thanks again !!

-bh

mitchoff1

I have this exact issue. Any idea why this is happening in the first place? I've never had any transactions with T-Mobile and Amex correctly has AT&T as the payee. Why is Quicken changing the payee?

jacobs

@mitchoff1  When you download or import transactions from a financial institution, they are run through a server which attempts to "clean up" Payee names.  Payee names from a bank or credit card company often come in pretty muddled, and Quicken users want them in a cleaner form.

So your financial institution might provide "Home Depot #1234 Anytown" and "Home Depot #5432 Anothertown" and you'd like to see them both as simply "Home Depot" in your Quicken register.

Or "APL*iTunes.com/Bill866-712-7753CA" should be renamed to "iTunes" or "Apple iTunes".

So Quicken processes Payee names through a server which anonymizes the transactions but tries to determine the best "crowd-sourced" version of a Payee name. It works well sometimes, and works in crazy ways other times, like your example of an AT&T purchase being changed to T-Mobile. I have no idea how it works behind the scenes and how such major mistakes in renaming can occur.

You can turn this off completely in your Quicken preferences, by the way, but you might find that the results for other transactions make it a less-than-appealing choice to turn off.

So the way to take control is to create local renaming rules for your Payees, so that once you set up a rule once, all future transactions will come in as yo'd expect.

John_in_NC

@jacobs
Yes, the renaming is true as you indicate. What is odd here is that just doesn't "clean up" the payee, it goes ahead and changes the payee in the payee list, and thusly, every spot it is in use. And in my case, this is when matching to an existing scheduled transaction using the old payee. There are no QF or renaming rules setup for this Payee-my schedtransx is already posted before downloads.

Quicken doesn't do this on any other payee. It retains my nomenclature, as it should.

jacobs

I use the language "clean up" -- or as the preference setting in Quicken Mac called it, "improve" -- quite broadly. What we really mean is "replace". In most cases, it replaces something like "APL*iTunes.com/Bill866-712-7753CA" with  "iTunes Store". But if something wrong gets into the server database, like AT&T > T-Mobile, users are stuck with crazy substitutions. I don't know of any way to report this; I'm not even sure if this service is run by Quicken or Intuit.

I have no idea why an imported transaction would be able to change the Payee on existing transactions; if the new imported transaction isn't an existing Payee, it should become one. the only thing I can think is that it's a sequence of events problem: the new transaction comes in, matches an existing Payee in the database, then goes through the cleanup server, comes back with a new name, and changes the Payee. Perhaps this is because it needs to import the transaction and check for a local renaming rule before going through the server-based renaming?

You say there are no renaming rules set up for this Payee; what would happen if you created one? Would the local renaming rule "win" and keep the Payee name you want and have specified in the scheduled transaction?