Huge Frustration w/ Credit Card transactions matching to other cards?

Question

Using Quicken Home/Bus/Rental. For some reason upon downloading credit card transactions, it is categorizes some of them to another card as a payment.

I am an online seller and have close to 20 cards connected which have several thousand transactions.

For instance, one service I use lists the payee as "Teapplixinc." I correctly categorized many of these transactions as postage, but then there is another transaction just a few days later that Quicken has set the category to another of my Amex cards, thereby posting it as I guess a payment/transfer.

I buy a lot of stuff from Home Depot and made an asset account called "Inventory" and set that category to those purchases. Upon importing .qfx files from Amex to bring in older transactions, it took most of the Home Depot charges from my Amex Gold card and categorized them to my Amex Platinum. How does this make any sense??

And if you're wondering why I'm attempting to use Quicken in this manner, I did buy a subscription to QBO Plus and attempted to set that up, but it also is having some major issues. I figured I'd give Quicken a go because it should be doable while maybe not as automated. But this behavior makes no sense and I'm wondering if it's broken as well.

mshiggins · Accepted Answer

I think you may be seeing the effect of the automatic transfer detection.  If this preference is enabled, Quicken will turn two separate transactions in different accounts into a single transfer transaction. The feature can be helpful if Quicken gets it right or can be a pain if Quicken gets it wrong.

You’ll want to disable the preference or change the preference to “confirm possible transfers before entering in register” so you can decide what should actually be a transfer.

In QW2017, the menu path is Edit | Preferences | Transfer Detection.