Renaming Rules with "Contains"

Mattf123466

I'm trying to set up a renaming rule that will change both "levelupsweetgreen7551" and "levelupsweetgreen8732" to "Sweet Green." But when I go to make a new renaming rule, all I get is this cryptic box that says "Change payee to:" and "Quicken will rename the downloaded payee:" which seems to be saying that I can't do any sort of wildcard or "contains" rule.

Am I missing something?

Chris_QPW

Well that's another matter entirely what "contains" means.  Quicken Windows "contains" works the same way as in Quicken Mac.  In fact I believe Quicken Mac took that behavior from Quicken Windows.

They changed this several years ago.  Quicken Windows use to have Start With and Contains and they weren't "word based".  For whatever reason the Quicken developers thought that wasn't working for some people and changed to the word based contains system.

Interesting enough I looked for examples for "run on numbers" where they have a number concatenated at the end of the payee name (let alone a random one) and none of my accounts have that.

If the numbers aren't random, say they are store numbers you could just add to the renaming rule until you have all the stores that you go to covered.  If they are random, then there isn't anything you can do to fix this.

Chris_QPW

If you look at the renaming rules that are created instead of that dialog you will see this:


So basically all renaming rules are "contains".

Mattf123466

OK, so the first box I enter "Sweet Green", and the second thing labelled "Quicken will rename the downloaded payee:" I can put "levelupsw" and it will find what I'm looking for? The windows version doesn't suffer from the same shortcoming that the Mac does where "contains" means it has to be a full word separated by spaces, right?

Chris_QPW

Well that's another matter entirely what "contains" means.  Quicken Windows "contains" works the same way as in Quicken Mac.  In fact I believe Quicken Mac took that behavior from Quicken Windows.

They changed this several years ago.  Quicken Windows use to have Start With and Contains and they weren't "word based".  For whatever reason the Quicken developers thought that wasn't working for some people and changed to the word based contains system.

Interesting enough I looked for examples for "run on numbers" where they have a number concatenated at the end of the payee name (let alone a random one) and none of my accounts have that.

If the numbers aren't random, say they are store numbers you could just add to the renaming rule until you have all the stores that you go to covered.  If they are random, then there isn't anything you can do to fix this.

Mattf123466

Oh, that's weird. I wonder why the renaming rules would be so inflexible?

Regardless, thanks for saving me hours of pulling my hair out trying to get it to work!

Chris_QPW

Mattf123466 said:

Oh, that's weird. I wonder why the renaming rules would be so inflexible?

My guess would be that the felt that the flexibility would bring complexity that they don't want to support.
As in the most flexible system would be regular expressions, on the other hand most people would never know how to use the properly, which would result in lots of support calls.  So it would be about how can they cover the most use cases in the most simple way possible.

Personally I think they error a bit too much on the Quicken users not being handle such things, but that is just an opinion.

gptmegan

Hi, new user here. So my renaming rules box looks different. Doesn't say "If Payee Contains". It has "If quicken name is". when you go to add a rule it shows this box...no 'contains' option.

Chris_QPW

gptmegan said:

Hi, new user here. So my renaming rules box looks different. Doesn't say "If Payee Contains". It has "If quicken name is". when you go to add a rule it shows this box...no 'contains' option.

It seems that they have decided to default to "Quicken name".


You can click on the "If Quicken name is" to change it.

If you select the help icon on this dialog it will give you this information:


I'm going to have to do some testing to see exactly what effect of using Quicken Name over Payee Contains, in the past I haven't really ever found the two to give different results.

Chris_QPW

I did some tests and all the payees I tested the renaming rules worked the same whether I selected Quicken Name or "Payee Contains" in my Chase credit card.  But in the case of my Costco Citi credit card when I used Quicken Name it didn't rename the payee, but it does with "Payee Contains".

I'm not sure what is triggering the difference, maybe some kind of information they are getting from the financial institution and not getting with the other financial institution.

Given the behavior I really think the default should have bee "Payee Contains", or even better the Add Renaming rule dialog should allow for selecting between the two, instead of having to go back and changed it in the main dialog.

Mike Lawrence

This is a very non-intuitive way to design a feature and is very frustrating. Why doesn't Quicken add the option for exact or contains when you create the rule. Because there is no option when I create the rule, I thought they removed the contains feature. Thank you for this tip, but Quicken needs to "fix" this usability issue.

Chris_QPW

Mike Lawrence said:

This is a very non-intuitive way to design a feature and is very frustrating. Why doesn't Quicken add the option for exact or contains when you create the rule. Because there is no option when I create the rule, I thought they removed the contains feature. Thank you for this tip, but Quicken needs to "fix" this usability issue.

I agree, the renaming dialogs/settings/flow could really use some changes.

Stevemd

I agree that this is not at all intuitive. If Quicken ever gets around to looking at it, they should also rewrite the help page. I have no idea what "Does the text in the If the downloaded payee name contains this text field accurately represent what you want to search for?" is supposed to mean.

Matthew Friedman

It's 2021 and I just feel like the matching/renaming functions are stuck in the 1990s. I get frustrated about this literally every time I download transactions.

briankelly

A belated (because I just found it) thanks to Chris_QPW for the explanation on May 28. The solution provided--change "If Quicken Name is" to "If payee contains" is the solution (and I think should be marked as the Accepted Answer, as it actually answers the question).

The difference, as far as I can tell, is that "If Quicken Name is" looks for an exact match, so eBay O*abcdefg and eBay O*qdjkald will not be picked up by a single rule, while "contains" will look for "eBay O" and no matter what transaction numbers/letters eBay adds, a single rule will cover all such transactions.

TTSguy

How can something that should be so simple be made so difficult? I guess lot of users have the same question for a myriad of other reasons also. $51 a year doesn't buy much anymore.