Memo Field Doesn't Update In Downloaded Transactions

quickslick

I have methodically entered Payee names in Memorized Payees, and included the correct Category as well as the Memo that I want for each Payee (ex.: Electric Service-XXXX to XXXX). When I download transactions, everything is populated correctly into my check and credit card registers except for the desired Memo entries. Instead I receive the downloaded gibberish from the bank. If I go to each individual entry in the register, I can select the Payee and use the drop-down to go to the Memorized Payee listing, where I can choose the correct Payee and then choose "Use" from the drop-down. This will populate the fields correctly in the register, but of course overwrites the Amount (I have 0.00 for every Memorized Payee). Is there any way to have Quicken populate the Memo field with the desired text that is in the Memorized Payee's memo field?
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Rocket J Squirrel

You can manage this on an account-by-account basis.

Go to the accounts Account Details, Online Services tab. At the bottom, you'll see a check box for "Don't update memo when downloading". Check that and Quicken should leave your memos alone in that account.

quickslick

Thank you for your quick response. I did as you suggested, but this just results in blank Memos in the register. The Memos that I have entered in the Memorized Payee record for the Payee do not populate into the register's Memo field although the rest of the information does (Payee, Tags, etc.). Am I doing something else wrong?

Rocket J Squirrel

Are you saying that you enter the transaction from the Memorized Payee list and that fills in the Memo, but downloading later erases that memo? It shouldn't do that. If I have the scenario wrong, please elaborate.

quickslick

I have set up my Payees in the Memorized Payee List entering the Payee Name, Category, Tag and Memo that I want to see in the register when transactions for a particular Payee are downloaded from my bank. Everything populates properly in the register when I accept the downloads with the exception of the Memo. It either remains the same “gibberish” as the bank provided or, if I select the option you suggested, it will be blank. I hope I am making this clear—forgive me if I am not.

quickslick

Rocket-Just checking to see if you have any further thoughts on why the Memo field from Memorized Payees does not overwrite the Memo field in the downloaded transactions. This has created a very tedious time-intensive process of manually updating every downloaded transaction.

UKR

If you haven't done so already, I'd say it's time to call Quicken Support on the phone and report this as a possible bug.  Let them do a screen share session with you to review the situation on your computer, to determine the nature of the problem and to figure out how to fix it.

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Rocket J Squirrel

quickslick said:

Rocket-Just checking to see if you have any further thoughts on why the Memo field from Memorized Payees does not overwrite the Memo field in the downloaded transactions.

I'm not sure it's supposed to. I don't think there's matching between downloaded transactions and memorized transactions. In other words, I believe Quicken does not go through the Memorized Payees list looking for matches against downloaded transactions.

If you want your memorized memo field to populate the transaction, you should manually enter the transaction prior to downloading.

Chris_QPW

The rules for this have always been that if there is a downloaded memo it will override the one in the memorized payee.

There have been many complaints about this behavior for years, and that prompted them adding the recent feature to not import to the update memos for a given account.

What I wasn't sure about is if you turn off the downloaded memo, will you get the one in the memorized payee or none at all, so I just tested it.  There are two test cases with the option off.  Will you get the memorized payee's memo if there isn't any downloaded memo, and will you get it if there is.
Note as far as I'm concerned, based on the fact that the feature says "Don't update memo when downloading", if you take that literally then you shouldn't see any memo filled in, because it doesn't say "downloaded memo".  Now that might not be what people wanted, but that is what the feature says.

And the answer to both, is the memo will not be filled in.  In other words, the feature should be taken literally, if selected, you will not get any memo from either the downloaded one or memorized payee.  Note that the downloaded memo field is still filled in.

Chris_QPW

So, in summary, they really didn't fix the original request for most of the people that were complaining, but it did help people like me that didn't want to see a useless memo in my register but doesn't use memos in memorized payees.

quickslick

Oh, boy I am having a time with Quicken! I was under the mistaken impression that I could enter a "Memorized Payee" entry ONE TIME, with all of the information as I want it for downloaded transactions (Payee Name, Category, Tag and Memo) and then when new transactions download which match that Memorized Payee, the entry fields will populate with this desired info and I would be good to go...full automation. Now as you are saying, none of this really works. The Memo field does not populate at all, and many entries simply don't seem to respond to the Memorized Payee info and remain unchanged (what is up with that?). I finally came up with a temporary workaround process that goes like this:

1. I do the bank download and Accept All.
2. I move through each downloaded entry in the Register and copy the Amount (this is necessary because my Memorized Payees have a zero for the Amount).
3. I click the down arrow at the right of the Payee field in the Register and choose Memorized Payee List.
4. When the list opens, I scroll through and find the appropriate Memorized Payee, right-click and choose Use.
5. This properly populates all fields in the Register (including the Memo) but because there is no ability to have a wild card or blank field in the Memorized Payee entry, the Amount goes to zero (which is what I used for all entries in the Memorized Payee list).
6. I then paste the copied Amount back into the amount field in the register.

This process gets me what I wanted in the beginning, but is it is boatload of effort and an unfortunate side-effect has been created. Once I finish this process, each of these entries are marked "Uncleared". Great. If I click on the Uncleared pencil icon and choose Match To A Downloaded Transaction, the proper entry does not appear in the list, so I apparently can't clear it and have no idea what the ramifications of this "Uncleared" status will be down the road.

Any thoughts on this, particularly the new Uncleared problem would be appreciated.

[Deleted User]

You can mark uncleared items manually as reconciled (R) by right clicking the item and choosing reconciliation status.  As for what you are wanting to do - I think you need to populate the transactions before accepting the transactions.  In other words, accepting all, should not be step #1.  What I would do is when you see items in the download window, just click on them first.  When you do so, you will then see that the information has been placed (but not entered) into the last line of the register.  Go to the item in the register and make any changes you want and then hit *enter*.  Do this for each of the items.

quickslick

Thank you for the info about the Reconciliation Status. I couldn't find that on my own! As for my frustration with the lack of automation, your suggestion still doesn't fill in the Memo, and it deletes the Amount, so doesn't improve my workflow.

Quicken could fix all of this and vastly improve the way the software works by simply allowing the Memo field in the Memorized Payee to take precedence over any (or no) Memo that is part of the download, just as is done with the other fields (Payee, Category, Tag). If you don't want a memorized Memo to overwrite the downloaded Memo, just leave that blank in the Memorized Payee. As for overwriting the Amount, they could create a wildcard character to put in the Memorized Payee list Amount field that would never overwrite the downloaded amount in the Register.

Does anyone know how to suggest this to Quicken? It would turn this software into a relatively labor-free experience compared to what I am going through now and seems to be a simple change.

quickslick

I stand corrected--I wasn't doing what you suggested correctly, and your method for accepting one-by-one is a great improvement and doesn't overwrite the Amount in the Register. I would still like to see them make the change I described so that everything can be downloaded and accepted in one process, but your method is still a big help. Thanks!

[Deleted User]

@quickslick you are welcome and I am glad it worked, albeit a workaround.

Chris_QPW

Some people think that Accept All (after looking at each transaction individually is a good option), I personal think the option is one of the worse options put into Quicken because if used wrong it gives the worst possible result.

There are two main flows for downloading transactions.  Automatic transaction entry mode, and going through the Downloaded Transactions tab.

With automatic transaction entry mode, the transactions go directly into the register AND the status field is set to New or New Match.  At that point the user is supposed to review the transactions with the New/New Match status.

When not using this mode the transactions go into the Downloaded Transactions tab, but the user can only see the "results" one transaction at a time.  You select a transaction in the Downloaded Transaction tab, and it shows you the "result" in the register.  As in, you will see that it either matched a pre-existing transaction in the register, or it will show a new transaction with the category, amount and such filled int.

The big limitation for the Downloaded Transactions tab is that you have to look at them one at a time.

If one blindly comes in and hits Accept All they get the worst possible combination.  It puts all the transactions into the register, but it doesn't set the status to New/New Match, it just blank.  So, there isn't any way to know what is new and what isn't.

So, as @Damian pointed out your #1, definitely a bad idea.

On #2, you don't understand how Quicken works and as such are causing yourself a lot of extra work.

The memorized payee list is used in two different situations.  Manual entry and downloading of transactions to fill the category and such information.

You have used the manual entry way to bring up the memorized payee.

When you download a transaction if the payee matches a memorized payee exactly, except for case, it will use the category, memo, tag, in that memorized payee for the transaction entered into the register.  Notice that I didn't say the amount.  The amount always comes from the downloaded transaction (memo is a special case that I will go into in a bit).

Now what about the case where the downloaded payee isn't exactly what you want and doesn't match one of your memorized payees?  That is where the renaming rules come in, they are used to match the downloaded transaction's payee, and when they match, the payee is change to what is in the rule.  This is especially important for "normalizing" payees.  As in, changing something like "Safeway #4334" to "Safeway".  Here are a couple of examples.


How does this play out?  Here is an example of me downloading transactions

Note I didn't edit anything, this is the direct result of downloading (with automatic transaction entry mode on) and my renaming rules and memorized payee list kicking in to fill in the categories.

Here I included the Downloaded Payee so you can see that the renaming rule are working:


Same thing with automatic transaction entry mode off (only showing the first transaction, and hiding the downloaded memo that has personal information in it):

As you can see selecting the first transaction in the Downloaded Transactions tab shows it in the register with the category filled in.  If I hit Accept or Enter that transaction will be recorded.  And then I would need to go to the next one in the Downloaded Transactions tab.

I said the memo is special.  Most of the time, the financial institution doesn't put anything in the downloaded memo field.  For that case if there is a memo in the memorized payee it will be used, provided you didn't turn this off with the new feature in the Account Details -> Online Services tab.

When the financial institution does put in a memo that is when there is a conflict.  Should it use the one downloaded or the one in the memorized payee?

Quicken chooses the downloaded one.  The new feature for turning off the filling in of the memo, doesn't really solve this conflict, instead it just gives the user a way to not have a memo at all from either source.

There is one more "flow" that does change this up.  Some people like to enter all their transaction in manually and then match the downloaded transactions to them.  If one is doing that then clearly there isn't a conflict because if they pull up the memorized payee and it has a memo, it will get filled in and then that transaction will be entered into the register.  When matching to a downloaded transaction, Quicken will never overwrite what they user has put in to the transaction in the register, so no conflict there for the memos.

I personally don't pre-enter all my transactions; it is much more work than I want to do.  Not to mention matching transactions has its own quirks.  I do pre-enter (using reminders) transfers to make sure those are entered correctly.  Quicken's transfer matching is just a "guess" that can be wrong.

Chris_QPW

Reading your post again, I see you mention the pencil icon and matching, so I will cover that too.

The main reason that didn't work for you is because you used Accept All, and because you are in the wrong mode.

The use of the pencil icon/menu for matching is only in Automatic transaction entry mode.

Let me take you through a real-world example.  I will first do it with Automatic transaction entry mode, and then with it going through the Downloaded Transactions tab.
I have a pre-entered reminder for the paying off of my credit card, but because of returns and sometimes I just like the estimate be filled in, so it will not always be the right amount.


The first thing I need to do is correct the amount on the manually entered transaction.


Now I click on the pencil icon/Uncleared.

Selecting "Match to a downloaded transaction"

Select Accept Match and then look at the register and see the two transactions have been merged.


Note for New Match if you click on it you can unmatch it there is a mistake and it will split the transaction back into a manual entered transaction and a downloaded one marked New.

Your situation was impossible to match, because after doing an Accept All you don't have any transaction with the New status set.  And note for this match the amounts have to be the same.

Now doing it with the Downloaded Transaction tab.
Because the amounts are different, of course they don't match:


The procedure to get them to match is similar.  I change the amount of the manually entered transaction.


Immediately the downloaded transaction is marked as Match, and moved to the top of the list.  Matched transactions are always at the top of the list.  Now I can select it in the Downloaded Transaction tab, and you see that it selected the matching manual entered transaction in the register.


Hitting Enter or selecting Accept will merge the two transactions.


Now a warning about the manual match in this mode.  When using the automatic transaction entry mode and manually matching, the amounts have to be exactly the same between the manually entered transaction and the downloaded one.  When the using the Downloaded Transactions tab, the amounts can be different, but in this case the result is almost never what the users wants.  They should instead do what I did above and change the amount in the manually entered transaction to get the match.


Dialog comes up and I select the transaction from 5/13/2022.

Select Accept Match:
Notice the amount is correct, but look it is now a split transaction, so what is going on.  Opening the split.


I contend that this behavior is wrong in 99% of use cases.  Most of the time what they user would have really wanted is the amount to just be changed in the manually entered transaction to the one downloaded.

This happens all the time, the amount is slightly off from what you expect.  Even one penny off and it will still do this.

quickslick

I really appreciate the amount of time you spent on this in-depth explanation and I'm sure it will help others as well. I guess the disconnect comes from the fact that many people apparently enter transactions as they make purchases, but I don't have this kind of time. I just do a periodic download from the bank and let that be my transaction entry process.

This being said, what I did was set up all of my Payees in the Memorized Payee list along with the desired Category, Tag and Memo. I leave the Amount blank (Quicken makes this $0.00) because the Payee amounts are almost never the same (lots of restaurants with different charge amounts). I make sure each Memorized Payee has a Rule configured that matches the "gibberish" Memo info that comes from the bank. My goal is that when I download my transactions periodically I choose Accept All in the expectation that Quicken will match each transaction to the Memorized Payee and enter the desired Category, Tag and Memo info as defined in the Memorized Payee. Seems simple and this process works great with the exception that the "gibberish" Memo is not replaced with the desired Memo from the Memorized Payee. It even leaves the correct amount in place, sets the proper Category and Tag, but won't replace the Memo field. Oh, well.

This is my simple vision of how Quicken SHOULD work. I guess I don't understand why anyone would expect it to work any other way! As for the matching of credit card payments with the corresponding credit card account, this always functions properly during the download. All that occurs is that Quicken asks if the amounts are a Transfer and I confirm that they are and all is good.

My #1-6 step process described above is the workaround that I have had to adopt, but thanks to Damian (also above), I find that I now need a Step #7 of selecting each downloaded transaction and then choosing the Reconciliation Status and changing it from Not Cleared to get rid of the little pencil icon.

I know you probably think this is crazy. Please let me know how I am misguided with this process...I won't be offended.

Chris_QPW

I certainly agree that one should be able to override the downloaded memo with the one in the memorized payee.  When they put in the new feature, they only fixed "half the problem".  I'm guessing that there was some kind of hidden complication of why they did it this way, but without seeing the code there is no way for me to really pass judgement on this.

Maybe I can suggest something a bit different though.  Personally, I hardly ever use the memo.  The payee and the category are what are important to me.

First off let me say that I'm trying to understand why you need a memo in all of these transactions.
Can you explain the purpose for that?

Is just to clean up the "gibberish" or are they actually used for changing things?
To me it is the payee's name that I would want to clean up/set to be unique.

For instance, in my wife's Costco card the memo always has her name in it.  I don't have a card, but I assume that if I did, it would have my name in the memo.  I had this and wanted to separate them out I could create a renaming rule based on that memo and therefore redirect the payee to two different memorized payees.  In reality there isn't anything in my financial institutions' downloaded memos that I would use instead of just the downloaded payee.  Now some financial institution's mess up and put the important payee information in the downloaded memo instead of the downloaded payee, but the renaming rules look at both the payee and the memo to and only change the payee, so it really has nothing to do with the resulting memo put into the transaction.

But when you look at reports the easiest things to filter by are payees, categories, and tags.  Memos are hard to use.  And what's more just to redirect to two different memorized payees would require two unique payees, so why have unique memos?

Chris_QPW

BTW I will say this.  If your process is to use Accept All, you should be using automatic transaction entry mode instead.  It is basically the same, with the exception that you will now have a New/New Match status that lets you know which transactions are new.

Downloaded transactions into Quicken should always be reviewed in some way.  Whether it is one at a time, in the Downloaded Transactions tab, or by scanning all of the New/New Match transaction in automatic transaction entry mode.  Personally, I find the later, much fast since almost all of my transactions will have already be categorized correctly.  Note I have Quicken's automatic categorization off so that for new payees I get a blank category that I fill in, and then do Ctrl+M to memorize.

I follow this review process (which I make sure categories are correct) with Ctrl+R/reconcile.  The reconcile checks the "math" (but not the categories/tags), and when finished it clears the New/New Match statuses, instead of me doing that while I'm scanning the transactions for the "review".

Note that automatic reconcile should never be used with automatic transaction entry mode.  It is triggered at the end of the download and as such will clear the New/New Match statuses before you have a chance to review the categories/tags and such.  Note this isn't the same as reconciling to the online balance, that is still possible if your financial institution provides it reliably.

When using the Downloaded Transactions tab, the automatic reconcile isn't triggered until you have accepted all the transactions into the register, so it is safe to use as long as you are using Accept All.

TTSguy

It seems to me that the "Memo" feature is one step from being complete for 3 reasons.

1) If you set up a transaction, then save it with a Memo to Memorized Payees, Quicken does in fact "know      that there is a Memo for that saved MP, that info is "In" Quicken.

2) If the transaction with a memo is saved in and with the MP and it can be loaded by selecting the 
    transaction, then going to that transaction in the MP and selecting it, selecting "Use" and that 
    transaction is loaded with the Memo you want. Again, Quicken knows there is a memo, and if you can        manually load it with "Use", it should be automatically available for the program to do a "Use command.

3)  Lastly, the fact that you can choose to view the "Downloaded Memo" column to see the info in the              Memo column from the original transaction tells me that the "Memo field is wide open to be used for 
    exactly what this duscussion is about. Using the memo field to put in what we want!

Chris_QPW

As I look into this, I see in fact that there were two different feature requests, and this is the one that they implemented:
Register memos — Quicken

There was another that was about allowing the memorized payee memo to override the downloaded one (which I can't find even though have searched for it).

quickslick

Rocket, Chris_QPW, Damian--I really appreciate the large amount of time you all have spent responding to my query. I have learned a tremendous amount about Quicken from this thread and maybe Chris is right, I should just give up on Memos, although I have always used them to provide detail about past transactions. Is there a way I can plead my case with Quicken about how his Memorized Payee Memo issue is handled in the software? Maybe TTSguy would join in my lobbying effort!

Thanks again, everyone.

TTSguy

@quickslick I think the only thing you can do is post your idea under "Ideas". This is something that could be improved, but you, me, superusers, and moderators just don't have the "teeth" to make anything happen on making a change.

If you wanted to present this as an idea to be voted on, it would take a VERY well written explanation of what was being used before, what the intention of the requested change included and why. Then a case needs to be made as to how and why it didn't turn out as well as it could have.

You seem well versed in your writing skills, so it's about how well you present your "case". It would need to be as meticulous as a "Brief" would have to be in a court of law. Chris could be your best bet to look at this issue in the past, how the change was presented, and any ideas on how to explain your suggestion and how the result would be the best to improve handling of Memo's.

I concur with your reason for discontent over the Memo issues, but a well written "Idea" presented to other users and convincing them unequivocally that there's a better way, and get a yes vote from them might be the next and the only way to move this along to get Developers to take note and consider a change.

Never say never, but it's a steep hill to master!

Chris_QPW

For what it is worth I went looking for the original suggestion on this (which was marked implemented) and I couldn't find it.  Most likely because they have archived it.

In the search though I noticed another Idea post that was identical to what they implemented (not marked implemented).  And numerous posts where the current implementation does in fact fulfill what these people wanted.

So, at this point I think @TTSguy is right and another Idea post has to be created, and carefully worded that the intent is to be able to pick the memorized payee memo over the downloaded one, not just remove them both.

To post an Idea go to the Home page and select New Post -> New Idea

quickslick

Thank you very much for the info. I will work on getting my suggestion posted that this weekend.

TTSguy

Be diligent about this. If you can write a well composed post that others can understand, what you'd like to have done, how it would work, and why it is a good idea, and get lots of votes for it, that is what it takes to move the mountain to make it happen. You'll have my vote and hopefully many others, even from super users. It is a GREAT idea. Hang in!

quickslick

Well it took me forever to get this pulled together (don't ask!), but I have finally posted my feature request in the Ideas section of this portal. It can be found at:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7914512/allow-memorized-payee-list-memos-to-overide-downloaded-memo-information/p1?new=1

Please vote for it--Thanks!