Quicken doesn't remember categories

Michael Griffith

Quicken used to always remember the category for a vendor. Now,e.g., when download credit card transactions purchases at grocery store, for example, don't always get categorized as "groceries"; there are many other examples of repeated use of a vendor doesn't get properly categorized. What's happening?

jacobs

@Michael Griffith Do a little work before the next time you download transactions. Find an existing transaction for a Payee for which you want a category memorized. Click it and press Command-Y (or Transactions > Save QuickFill Rule). You can set the rule to record just the Category, or the Amount, Memo, or Tags. Do this for a few recurring Payees before you next download, so you can then observe how the rules get applied when you do the download. 

Quicken gives you great flexibility about when QuickFill rules are or aren't created. In Preferences > Register, you can turn on or off a global setting to automatically create a QuickFill rule when you enter or edit a transaction. But on every transaction you enter, there's a pop-up blue checkbox above the Category field where you can override the global setting if you wish. (For instance, I have the preference setting ruled on, because I generally want to create QuickFill rules from my transactions. But for a Payee like Amazon, I might not want to create a QuickFill rule because different purchases will be categorized differently, so I could uncheck the box if I were entering a transaction for Amazon. Or perhaps you don't want Amazon to ever be auto-categorized; you could create aQuickFill rule for Amazon with no category and lock it.) And you can create QuickFill rules manually via the Windows > Payees and Rules screen, or create them from existing transactions via Transactions > Create QuickFill Rule. So you can really sculpt the way you want to work with QuickFill rules, and your library of saved QuickFill rules, to your exact liking. 

Quicken Anja

Hello @Michael Griffith,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community to tell us about your issue, though I apologize that you are experiencing this.

Could you please provide which version of Quicken you have currently running?

• Quicken > About Quicken

Have you tried creating QuickFill Rules to save the Payee name(s) with the correct category and account(s) and see if that helps avoid this issue? If you haven't already, please take a moment to review this Product Help article for more information and instructions on creating and using QuickFill Rules.

I hope this helps!

Michael Griffith

I'll try it next time I have download of credit card purchases. Thanks.

jacobs

@Michael Griffith Do a little work before the next time you download transactions. Find an existing transaction for a Payee for which you want a category memorized. Click it and press Command-Y (or Transactions > Save QuickFill Rule). You can set the rule to record just the Category, or the Amount, Memo, or Tags. Do this for a few recurring Payees before you next download, so you can then observe how the rules get applied when you do the download. 

Quicken gives you great flexibility about when QuickFill rules are or aren't created. In Preferences > Register, you can turn on or off a global setting to automatically create a QuickFill rule when you enter or edit a transaction. But on every transaction you enter, there's a pop-up blue checkbox above the Category field where you can override the global setting if you wish. (For instance, I have the preference setting ruled on, because I generally want to create QuickFill rules from my transactions. But for a Payee like Amazon, I might not want to create a QuickFill rule because different purchases will be categorized differently, so I could uncheck the box if I were entering a transaction for Amazon. Or perhaps you don't want Amazon to ever be auto-categorized; you could create aQuickFill rule for Amazon with no category and lock it.) And you can create QuickFill rules manually via the Windows > Payees and Rules screen, or create them from existing transactions via Transactions > Create QuickFill Rule. So you can really sculpt the way you want to work with QuickFill rules, and your library of saved QuickFill rules, to your exact liking. 

Michael Griffith

Thanks, jacobs. I've now tried it and Q behaves as you say. QuickFill is very helpful. I do, however, remember the day many Q versions ago when Q always remembered the category long before QuikFill

jacobs

@Michael Griffith Back in the old days with the legacy Quicken 2007 and earlier, there was a preference to have every transaction recorded as a QuickFill Transaction. Modern Quicken Mac has a similar preference setting, but unlike the past, you can override it on any individual transaction. In Quicken 2007, QuickFill transactions were stored separately from the actual transaction table, so editing the name of a Payee in one place didn't affect the other; in modern Quicken Mac, there's only a single table of transactions, which makes it less likely to have duplicate variants scattered around.

When modern Quicken Mac came out in 2014, it treated every transaction like a QuickFill; the next time you used a Payee, it would autofill the information from the most recent transaction using that Payee. But there was no way around it; you couldn't override it, or have two variants for the same Payee.

A few years later, they introduced the current QuickFill rules -- and to me, it's the best of all worlds, because it gives users complete control over how and when they want to use (or not use) QuickFill rules. It just takes a little experimentation to discover all the options it gives you.