Struggling to use the Mac version of Quicken. Wrong payees, categories, memo fields...Please help!

t.linn

I've migrated from Windows to Mac and I'm struggling with the Mac version of Quicken. It feels like a crippled version of the original. I'm hoping it is user error. Here are the biggest problems I've encountered:

1. Quicken for Mac is substituting payee names for the downloaded ones. I have 8 downloaded transactions in a month labeled "Toyota Financial Svcs" even though I haven't had an active Toyota account in 8 years. It substituted "Verizon Wireless" for Staples. How do I turn off this random name reassignment?

2. Quicken for Mac is adding categories to downloaded transactions. I need to change them nearly 100% of the time. How do I turn auto-categorization off? Google search results refer to options that seem to be available in the Windows version only.

3. Quicken for Mac has randomly added notes to the memo field. For example, it has added "refund of credit balance AMEX SimplyCash" to the memo field of every remote deposit I've made for years. WTF? I have over a decade of carefully curated accounts and Quicken for Mac has made it so that I don't know if the memo fields are even relevant. How do I reverse this?

4. I review every transaction as it is downloaded. In Quicken for Windows, it was easy to determine the transactions that had not been reviewed because they were kept in a separate queue. This queue is missing in the Mac version. Is there an alternative system in Quicken for Mac? I see the blue dot in the far left column but I have to manually switch that on or off.

Thanks in advance for any help. I'm not opposed to learning to do things a different way.

Jon

t.linn said:

1. Quicken for Mac is substituting payee names for the downloaded ones.

From the Window menu you can bring up the Payees & Rules window. Select the Renaming Rules tab and you can see all the renaming rules Quicken is applying. You can go through & try to clean up the rules, or you can just delete everything & start over fresh. If you don't want Quicken to create any new renaming rules, go into Preferences and on the Register tab uncheck "Automatically create rule when I correct a payee name".

2. Quicken for Mac is adding categories to downloaded transactions. I need to change them nearly 100% of the time. How do I turn auto-categorization off?

There's a couple things that could be, I'm not sure which one it is. It could be a QuickFill rule, which you can edit from the QuickFill tab on the Payees & Rules window. There's also an option in Quicken Preferences on the Connected Services tab, "Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names & categories" which could be doing something to your downloads, you might try turning that off.

4. I review every transaction as it is downloaded. In Quicken for Windows, it was easy to determine the transactions that had not been reviewed because they were kept in a separate queue. This queue is missing in the Mac version. Is there an alternative system in Quicken for Mac? I see the blue dot in the far left column but I have to manually switch that on or off.

That's how it works in Quicken Mac. Downloaded transactions are placed directly in the appropriate register. New transactions get a blue dot, transactions that match up with a manually entered transaction get a blue pencil. Any accounts with new transactions get a blue dot in the account sidebar. You have to manually clear those out. If you right click on one of those blue dots or pencils in the account register, it gives you the option to clear all of them for that account at once.

One thing you could do would be to click on the All Transactions view in the account sidebar and then sort on the CLR column. I think that will lump up all your new transactions together fi you still want to see them that way. You might even be able to clear out all the blue icons in one shot from that view, I've never tried it. 

As for the Memo fields, I don't have any good advice for that. It sounds like something went awry when you imported your Windows file. I don't think there's any way to undo that from within Quicken Mac. You could try importing your Windows file again but I don't know what you could do differently to change the outcome.

t.linn

Thank you, Jon. I am extremely grateful you were willing to take the time to help me with this. Your insights will definitely help me resolve a couple of these issues and provide a strategy for dealing with the others. Much appreciated.

drfleming

I have Quicken Deluxe for my Mac (Monterey), and it continually either does not download investment transactions or records them with the wrong type. For example, a buy action when it is a reinvested dividend. I am constantly entering transactions or editing them.

UKR

drfleming said:

I have Quicken Deluxe for my Mac (Monterey), and it continually either does not download investment transactions or records them with the wrong type. For example, a buy action when it is a reinvested dividend. I am constantly entering transactions or editing them.

Some brokerages download reinvested dividend transactions as two separate transactions: a cash dividend received transaction and a Buy transaction. Could your brokerage be doing the same? If so, IMHO you should keep the two separate transactions in your register.

What type of transactions are not downloaded?

Jon

You can even have both things happen within the same account. In my Vanguard IRA, I have one investment where reinvested dividends are a single reinvested dividend transaction and another investment where the same thing shows up as separate buy/sell transactions. 

Chris_QPW

drfleming said:

I have Quicken Deluxe for my Mac (Monterey), and it continually either does not download investment transactions or records them with the wrong type. For example, a buy action when it is a reinvested dividend. I am constantly entering transactions or editing them.

What financial institution?

For my wife's 401K they code reinvestment as a normal buy.  Her 401K is managed by Merrill Lynch.
Note I'm on Quicken Windows, so you can see this has nothing to do with how Quicken works and everything to do with how the financial institution codes the transaction when it sends it to Quicken.