Brokerage Interest Not Categorized by Quicken

gwpotter

Recently I switched from Vanguard to Charles Schwab. I have noticed that the interest paid on cash in my Schwab accounts is not classified as anything -- Since the Statement Memo and Statement Payee columns both indicate an interest payment, this seems like some kind of bug.

This raises two questions:

#1. How do I bring this to Quicken's attention?

#2. Unless and until Quicken corrected lists these transactions as Interest Income, is there any way short of manually changing these transactions every months? (I have 7 accounts with this issue.)

jacobs

What's not clear from your screenshots is what fields you are showing. Category is Unclassified; is Payee also Unclassified? Or is Payee not shown here? The goal is to see if there is a unique Payee name, or if one can be created, so you could have a QuickFill rule to apply the interest income category. Click on one of the interest transactions and to View > Show Inspector. Look at both the Payee name in the middle of the window and the Statement Payee name near the bottom. What do they show? 

gwpotter

Sorry I did not include the headers with my screen shot - Does this one help? What I expect Quicken to do is notice and report that the $0.11 of the entry is Interest Income in the line below headers.

jacobs

Please view the Transaction Inspector as I suggested above. We need to know if there is something upon which a Renaming Rule or QuickFill rule could be based. 

gwpotter

Inspector Screen Shot

jacobs

Okay, so now it seems you do have options, because there is a Payee name: "Bank Int Xx". So you could create a QuickFill rule for Payee "Bank Int Xx" to have Category set to Interest Income.

Or you could do a little more clean-up and create a Payee Renaming Rule: when Statement Payee contains "Bank Int", set the Quicken Payee name to "Schwab Bank Interest" or something like that; then make the QuickFill Rule for Payee=Schwab Bank Interest to have the category of Interest Income. (This assumes you don't have another bank which also sends transactions with a Payee of "Bank Int".)

gwpotter

I prefer the more complete and elegant approach.

In your 12:42PM reply above you wrote a QuickFill rule for "Payee Int Xx". Does Quicken get the entree "Payee Int Xx" from by truncating the Statement Payee of "BANK INT XXXXXX-XX1522 SCHWAB BANK" shown in the Transaction Inspector?

Am I correct is thinking the Rules are not case sensitive?

If I list multiple words in the "contains" function must all these be present for the rule to apply?

This issue exists multiple IRA accounts - all at Schwab and in a single Quicken File. I sense one Rule in my Traditional IRA also rename entries in my wife's Roth IRA and all other accounts in the same Quicken file. Correct?

Is it better to let Quicken create the Rule within the Register or is it better for me to write the rule in the "Payees & Rules" window?

jacobs

@gwpotter  Here are answers to your questions. The good thing is that you can experiment with rules and if something you created doesn't do what you expected, you can edit the transaction and then tweak the rule for the next time.

1) Quicken creates its Payee name in various ways which may involve using information from the Statement Payee Name and sometimes from the Statement Memo field. For instance, I'm looking at a transaction of mine paying a Lowe's credit card. The Transactions Inspector shows the Statement Payee is "Lowes CC         LWS EPAY" and the Statement Memo is "Preauthorized Debit". Quicken mixes them together to create a Payee Name of "Lowes CC LWS EPAY Debit". In some cases, Quicken uses crowd-sourced server-based renaming rules to replace a cryptic Payee name with one you might expect. For instance, my energy company is called "PECO". The downloaded Statement Payee shows "PECOENERGY       UTIL_BIL" but Quicken shows a Quicken Name and Payee of "PECO". Or my payment of an Amex credit card has a dowloaded Statement Payee of "AMEX EPAYMENT    ACH PMT" but Quicken changes it to "American Express". By creating a local renaming rule of your own, you can decide what you want a Payee to be called. For instance, I could write a renaming rule to change "AMEX" "EPAYMENT" to Payee="AmEx". 

2) I'm pretty sure Renaming rules aren't case sensitive. (But if when you can see in the Transactions Inspector window exactly what your financial institution is sending, you might as well enter exactly that.)

3) Renaming Rules use word "tokens", which you'll see if you start typing in the "if statement name contains" field. Matching will only occur if each token is present and in the order in the rule. So a rule for "Home" "Depot" will match a statement payee which contains "Home Depot" but not "Depot for the Home" or "Home of Everything Depot".

4) Rules are "global" across your accounts; there is no way to create a rule which is account-specific. 

5) It doesn't matter at all if you create a QuickFill rule within a register, as a transaction is being entered, or if you go to the Payees & Rules window to build it yourself. Either approach does the same thing, and the rule ends up in the same place. The Payees & Rules window gives you a little more control over exactly which fields you do and don't want the rule to place in future transactions, and it gives you the options to Lock a rule if you wish. (So if you want to create the rule with the category and a memo, but no amount, you can do so by building the rule, or editing it, in the rules window and then setting it to be locked.)

One thing which may help your understanding: Payee renaming rules are applied first; QuickFill rules are applied last. That's why you can first normalize a downloaded Payee name to what you want it to be, and then have a QuickFill rule for that applied Payee name.