How do I make downloaded transactions default to the correct category

klef25

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.

Jim_Harman

Have you edited the remaining entry in the Memorized Payee List (MPL) so that it uses the correct Category? That will not affect transactions that you have already accepted.

You can also select the Lock box when editing the memorized payee and the Category should always be the same.

If Quicken is trying to Auto-Categorize the payee and the Lock box is not checked, that may override the the Category in the MPL.

Please let us know if that fixes it for you.

klef25

I have edited the entry in the MPL and locked it. that has not helped. I don't know if this matters, but the downloaded transactions that I am working through were downloaded a quite some time ago. The category is defaulting to something that was never saved in the MPL, so I'm not sure where it is pulling from.

Jim_Harman

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.

Jim_Harman

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.

Chris_QPW

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