How do I make downloaded transactions default to the correct category

Question

I have several years of downloaded transactions that I'm trying to accept. For one payor, they are defaulting to the wrong category because at one point that payor was a payee. It keeps defaulting to the expense rather than the income category. I've removed all but one entry for this payor in the Memorized Payee List, but it hasn't fixed the problem. I'm trying to save myself 2 clicks and the processing pause so that I can just click "accept" on all of the transactions from this payor, but I can't seem to get it to default to the correct category.

Chris_QPW · Answer

It might be worth running Validate and Repair to see if it is a problem in your data file that it can fix.

Jim_Harman · Answer

Make sure the entry in the MPL exactly matches the name you see in the Downloaded Transactions area, or else Quicken will use its defaults and not the info from the MPL. For example "Stop & Shop" in the MPL will not match and "Stop and Shop" or "Stop & Shop #12345"

If you share the name in the MPL and what you see in the Downloaded Transactions area, we may be able to help further.

Jim_Harman · Answer

You probably can't change Quicken's renaming and auto categorizing once the transactions have been downloaded, unless you want to restore a backup and download again. Note if the transactions were downloaded a long time ago, they may no longer be available at the FI to download again.

Renaming and auto characterizing for newly downloaded transactions are controlled by your renaming rules and settings at Edit > Preferences > Downloaded Transactions.

However I think if you have locked a Memorized Payee that exactly matches the name in the Downloaded Transactions area and has the desired Category, Quicken should use the Category from the MPL.

I assume the Income and Expense categories have different names. Normally Quicken does not allow duplicate names.