Please improve Quicken’s inability to match international transactions

Scott Rose

This is a feature request to enhance Quicken Mac's automatic "transaction matching" feature. This would really save me a ton of time on a daily basis.

I'm specifically referring to the feature where Quicken Mac automatically matches newly-downloaded transactions to previously-entered transactions (that you have previously entered manually into your account register).

The problem is that if you travel internationally like I do — even if you’re just traveling from the USA to Canada or Mexico — Quicken doesn’t actually match any of your downloaded transactions properly. This is because of fluctuating currency exchange rates on a daily basis. 

For example, while traveling in Canada, I might make a credit card transaction that is $80.50 USD at the time of the transaction. (The purchase was made in Canadian dollars, but at the time of purchase, my U.S. credit card company automatically converted it to U.S. Dollars as $80.50 USD and approved the transaction for $80.50 USD.)

So I will manually enter in a transaction of $80.50 USD into my Quicken account register, because my accounts are all USD accounts.

However, a few days later, when my bank settles/finalizes the transaction, the transaction is no longer $80.50 USD anymore. The transaction might now be finalized/settled at $81.00 USD. Or the transaction might now be finalized/settled as $80.00 USD.

This is because of fluctuating currency exchange rates. The transaction was originally $80.50 USD when I made the transaction, but by the time it settled at my bank, the transaction was a different USD amount.

So Quicken downloads the transaction from my bank, but Quicken is unable to match the downloaded transaction to the manually-entered transaction that I previously typed in manually. This is because the dollar amounts do not match identically!

Rightfully so, Quicken Mac doesn't recognize these 2 transactions as the exact same transaction. Very smart of Quicken to not recognize these 2 transactions as the same transaction — because the dollar amount was different!

However, because of this, I have to constantly match my own transactions by hand on a daily basis whenever I’m doing international travel. 

In other words, I need to “fix” the matching behavior of Quicken, even though Quicken technically didn’t do anything wrong.

But my manually-entered transactions will ALWAYS off by a few cents from the finalized transaction which was downloaded from the bank. So this manually fixing of "matching transactions" is a part of my everyday life in Quicken Mac. There's not a single day that goes by that I don't have to manually match my own transactions by hand.

What would be really amazing — and a huge time-saver for me — would be if Quicken Mac's automatic matching feature gave us a **PREFERENCE** that we could set where we could tell Quicken Mac to go ahead and match transactions that are "within a certain fluctuation range" of a few cents.

For example, we could tell Quicken Mac to "go ahead and automatically match transactions if the transactions are less than 50 cents off".

This would be an amazing time-saver and a huge game-changer for me!

Thanks,
Scott

Chris_QPW

It seems to me that if the title of this idea was changed a bit, it would get more votes.  There are other reasons why a payment might be a bit off than just currency exchange rate changes.

Note a similar request has been made time and time again on the Windows side, but they have never implemented it.

Personally, I would handle the problem by not pre-entering the charges.  I almost never pre-enter anything.