Checking Account (Q Mac)

henzlgc

How can I handle payee & category entries on checks from my checking account, Because every check is different what quickfill rule do I use?

jacobs

I'm not sure I understand your question; could you please describe what you are trying to do and having trouble with?

In general, if you download transactions from your bank, you will need to do some manual entry either in advance or after the fact, since the bank transmits the check number and amount, but not the name of the payee on the check.

One approach is to manually enter your check payments in Quicken. Because you are entering the Payee name, any QuickFill rule you've saved for each Payee will be applied. then, when you subsequently download the transaction from your bank, Quicken may auto-match the download to your manual entry, or you may need to drag your manual entry over the downloaded one for Quicken to merge them. 

The alternative it to not enter the check transaction manually, and wait for it to download. Then you'll need to edit the Payee field to the actual Payee. the downside of this is that you need to remember who each check was written to to enter it later, and that you have no record of the check you've sent until it clears your bank; you might forget you've written a check and to mentally deduct it from your available balance. 

henzlgc

I download transactions from my bank, but it autofills the Payee & Category with the same Name & category and I would like it to not autofill the name & category. How do I stop the autofill?

jacobs

I'm just guessing that the Payee name downloaded from your bank is the same for these transactions, and you saved a QuickFill rules for this Payee name, resulting in every transaction being the same category.

The first thing to do is to look at some of your downloaded transactions in the Transaction Inspector: click on one transactions and then View > Transactions. Look at the bottom section under the "From your financial institution" heading. The "Statement Payee" name here shows exactly what your bank is sending with the transaction. For electronic deposits and payments, you may get understandable Payee names, but for checks, you might just get "Check" as a Payee. (The bank doesn't know who you wrote it to.)

Is the Statement Payee name the same as the Payee name you see in Quicken? If not, there are two ways Quicken can rename your downloaded Payee names. One automatically happens in a background process on Quicken's servers, where it tries to "clean up" Payee names. For instance, a payment of your American Express bill from your checking account might have a downloaded Statement Payee name like "AMEX EPAYMENT ACH PMT" and Quicken will rename it to "American Express". You can turn this off via the first checkbox setting in Preferences > Connected Services if you find Quicken is inexplicably or incorrectly renaming some of your downloaded Payees. 

The other renaming happens if you have any local renaming rules for Payees in your database. Go to Window > Payees & Rules and click on the Renaming Rules tab; do you have any saved rules? A renaming rule lets you standardize or correct downloaded Payee names; if your ATM withdrawals show a location like "ATM Anytown #1234" and "ATM Sometown #9876", you can create a renaming rule: "If Statement Payee contains 'ATM', Set Payee name to 'ATM' ". If you have any inadvertent Renaming Rules, you can edit or delete them. Alternatively, you can create renaming rules like that sample.

Once you've got your Payee names squared away, you can turn to QuickFill rules. QuickFill rules exist for a specified Payee name, and allow you to specify the category you want used for a Payee. (Optionally, QuickFill rules can also b set to apply tags, memo, and splits.) You can control whether QuickFill rules are created automatically or not in another setting in Preferences > Register.

henzlgc

Thank You jacobs I really appreciate your help.