Error With Payee Names Auto Update From AmEx (Q Mac)

balthus

Never had this happen before but since January 2021 there are anywhere from 3-8 transactions a month where the payee name is not correct. They are different payees but they show up in Quicken as L.I. Bean. The dates and the amounts are correct. A few of them are the same payee that we had charges from in consecutive months. At first I thought I had some fraudulent charges as I thought it said LL Bean in Quicken and I knew we had not bought anything form them but when I looked at my AmEx statements I found the transactions but somehow the wrong payee name in Quicken,. I am sure it is not happening in Quicken but is in the data from AmEx. I wonder if these payees have something in common with how they are transacted to AmEx but there is no common pattern that I can tell. One is a local school where my husband buys supplies and he says it's a Square CC on an iPad but another is a monthly Gmail app. Anyone have this happen before or figure out how to fix it? It's so weird. Thanks,

John_in_NC

The first thing I would do is choose to display the "Statement Payee" column to see what is being sent from the financial institution before all the Quicken AI/Renaming rules kick in. That should be a good starting point.

The "Quicken Name" column will also show how it is being renamed by the Quicken servers, so you might wish to display both.

balthus

The "statement Payee" name is correct but the "Quicken Name" is the wrong. So does that mean the conversion is happening once the institution data gets to Quicken? And where do I go from here.? Thanks,

John_in_NC

Quicken is somewhat vague on how this works, but as I generally understand it, their data provider acquires the "Statement Payee", and then routes it through their renaming server to help you. This renaming server was (or still is) renaming things based on how most users rename that payee. (At one time, this was from Intuit's Mint users. It might still be today.) Then, that Quicken name gets downloaded to your local copy where any of your renaming rules will kick in. But, if it is wrong upstream, renaming rules only work so well.

Under Preferences:Connected Services, there is an option at the bottom:



Unchecking that will turn off that crowdsourced renaming. The caveat is that it will do it across all accounts.

This is one of those technologies that works well for the most part, but is a hassle when it does not.

It might be easiest if you simply keep the statement payee column showing, and then you will know what to do with the transaction. Seeing what is in that field might also allow you to setup a better renaming rule. Your mileage may vary. Good luck!

jacobs

@John_in_NC  I was under the impression that a local renaming rule would be acted on first, and would therefore trump a server-based renaming rule. You seem to say the order of operations is opposite. Is that really so?

John_in_NC

@jacobs: It might-I have never seen the official algorithm of how it works. (That is why I prefaced it with quicken being vague about how it works under the hood.) You might renaming rules more than I do, so you might have better advice here.

balthus

It is odd in that I had previous transactions from the same financial institution for the same payee in the past and it did not do this. But all the ones it happened with (apparently this started in 2020) changed the payee name to "L.L. Bean". I did call Quicken support back today and spoke with someone different who had me reset the cloud account in connected services under preferences and have me a case # in the event it happens again. He seems to think the rest will solve the problem. But thank you for suggesting the additional fields and I will keep these visible. Appreciate the help. Thanks.

balthus

And the automatically improve the quality of downloaded payees was not previously checked.