How do I replace text WITHIN Payee?

Mastodon

I have hundreds of transactions where the Payee starts with 'Debit Card Purchase' followed by useful information. I would like to get rid of the 'Debit Card Purchase' by replacing it with nothing, or a blank, or an abbreviation without losing the useful information in the Payee field. I have not found a way to do that since Find/Replace only replaces the entire field.

The Keeper

If I understand your problem correctly you want to edit the memorized payee?

From the toolbar select "memorized payee list"
or
Press CTRL key and T at the same time
or
Select "Tools" - memorized payee list

Select and highlight the payee titled "Debit Car Purchase" and then the "edit" button to the far right
Remove "Debit Card Purchase" text and then click "OK" at bottom of the window. You can also remove any other text in the edit window if you so desire or enter any text you desire.

For debit card purchases I like to enter the name of a merchant such as "Albertson's" then if I make a debit card purchase at Albertson's, I begin typing Alb and Quicken will enter Albertson's. I can then adjust the amount of the purchase or if I left the amount window in "edit" blank, I can enter the purchase amount.

q_lurker

I do not know if an easy way to replace part of the payee name in hundreds of existing transactions. 

As a brute force method, I would start by sorting the register by payee so that all like and similar payees would be grouped together. I think you can then select several transactions and edit those to have a common name. 

HTH

UKR

Find/Replace could be used, but only if you carefully select all, for example, "Debit card purchase Safeway" and change only those to "Safeway". Repeat for each variation until all "Debit card purchase xxxx" transactions have been changed to the desired proper Payee Name.

Avoid creating new register transactions with undesirable Payee Names by setting up Renaming Rules. See text below.

Transaction download problems with matching and adding new transactions correctly

First please ensure that all optional settings in Quicken pertaining to recall, memorization, automatic categorization and renaming of payee names are enabled. You find those settings in Edit / Preferences / Data Entry & Quickfill and Downloaded Transactions. Additional settings can be found for the detection and processing of transfer transactions in Edit / Preferences / Transfer detection.

Are you automatically accepting downloaded transactions into your registers?

If you are relying on Quicken to "automagically" fill your account registers from downloaded transactions, you may run into problems. Despite all efforts by the Quicken programmers, the "Autopilot" (that's my name for the part of the Quicken program which processes downloaded transactions and converts them into new register transactions) is not infallible. For that process to work 100% of the time one would need a crystal ball because the information downloaded from the banks often is just too terse and cryptic.

You should, at least for a while, turn off the "automatically accept downloaded transactions into registers" setting to gain better control over what is downloaded and what to do with it. Click on and review each downloaded transaction, make changes if necessary (e.g., to get a payee name = "Starbucks" instead of "POS TRANS 070119 STARBU", "POS TRANS 070219 STARBU", "POS TRANS 070319 STARBU" or to assign a category) before you click to accept each transaction.

Any changes you make to downloaded Payee Names are remembered in Renaming Rules.

Any other changes you make (add/change Category or Memo text) are remembered in the Memorized Payee List.

Next time the same transaction for this Payee comes along, Quicken should remember and give you a better new register transaction.

 

In case you have issues with transfer transactions not being generated correctly:

For best results manually enter transfer transactions into your register BEFORE you download transactions from the bank which contain the transfer confirmations. For recurring transfers use scheduled reminders and enter them a day or two before the due date. Be sure to use distinct Payee Names for each transfer / credit card payment to avoid confusing Quicken - memorized payee entries.
That takes the guesswork out of the Autopilot's process. Because a correctly entered transfer transaction already exists in your account registers, the Autopilot should just match the downloaded transfer transaction to the existing one in both accounts.

 

Where are the "Auto-accept downloaded transaction" settings?

There are two places where this is controlled in Quicken for Windows:
 - Globally, for all accounts, in Edit / Preferences / Downloaded Transactions
 - For each account individually, the global setting can be overridden from the Edit Account Details screen, Online Services Tab. Look for blue text "Automatic Entry is: ON / OFF". Click the text to change the setting.

David Green

You might be able to do this using the Renaming rules and have it apply to existing transactions. If you decide to try this, create a backup file first.

Chris_QPW

David Green said:

You might be able to do this using the Renaming rules and have it apply to existing transactions. If you decide to try this, create a backup file first.

Renaming rules only apply to future downloaded transactions.

anoren

The feature needed from Quicken here is:
In the "create renaming rule" window, there are 2 textboxes,
1st is "If statement name contains"
2nd is "Set payee name to"
Quicken product team shouldn't consider us customers to be such simpletons that we want such simple renaming rules.
I want more options, like,
a 3rd textbox could be "Remove from payee name" and it will remove the words from payee name if supplied in the 3rd textbox

anoren

Many such use cases can be made, where renaming should supply a regex expression to rename to

anoren

One way to solve in current version is,
create as many renaming rules as there are payee names.
Defeats the purpose of having a renaming rule,

This can be easily done in a Google spreadsheet, I'm going back to using spreadsheets for budgeting if I have to edit transactions every month

Quicken Jared

anoren said:

The feature needed from Quicken here is:
In the "create renaming rule" window, there are 2 textboxes,
1st is "If statement name contains"
2nd is "Set payee name to"
Quicken product team shouldn't consider us customers to be such simpletons that we want such simple renaming rules.
I want more options, like,
a 3rd textbox could be "Remove from payee name" and it will remove the words from payee name if supplied in the 3rd textbox

Hello @anoren, 

I am sorry to hear that you are not seeing the feature you are looking for. Thank you for discussing this with us here on the Quicken Community.

I would like to draw your attention to the process of submitting 'Idea' threads to the Quicken Community regarding features you would like to see implemented in future updates. Quicken users can suggest such features in the form of an Ideation or Idea post, which is then voted on by the other users, and - should it prove popular enough - passed along to the development team for consideration. You can read more about how to submit Idea posts in the thread linked here.

I hope that is helpful.  

Thank you,

Quicken Jared 

anoren

Thanks,

One such idea was already there: https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7907237/complex-renaming-rules-for-downloaded-transactions

I added my requested feature in comment

mshiggins

anoren said:

One way to solve in current version is,
create as many renaming rules as there are payee names.
Defeats the purpose of having a renaming rule,

This can be easily done in a Google spreadsheet, I'm going back to using spreadsheets for budgeting if I have to edit transactions every month

@anoren
How many payees do you have?