Downloaded transaction payees are all the same

Jimmy V

I just downloaded my checking account transactions for last year. At least 50% show the same "payee and category". I tried deleting the transactions and downloading the QFX file again which only made things worse. I am not looking forward to editing hundreds of transactions to get the correct payee and categories. Any suggestions?

Mark1104

the Bank does not normally data enter the Payee name. are you writing a lot of checks? Someone along the way has to enter the Payee and the category….most likely that is you 😀

Chris_QPW

The most likely cause of the payees all being the same is a renaming rule that is too generic and is matching pretty much all payees. Look in Tools → Renaming Rules

And note that it is the payee that picks up the Memorized payee, that fills in what category to use.

And as @Mark1104 points out, checks will not have any payee, and all need to be either pre-entered and matched to, or edit at the time of downloading them.

But this also illustrates why it is a bad idea to wait to tax season and try importing all of last year's data to do their taxes. Especially if you have yet to have almost all of you payees memorized. There isn’t any magic in Quicken’s automatic picking of categories that is going to ensure that the right category is picked for a given transaction for your taxes.

What’s more with the exception of business and charity expenses that would only be entered into Quicken transactions are almost never the “authority source” instead it would be the 1099s and such. As such, getting the data for those into your tax program would be better done directly from the source. Quicken when used throughout the year is a good double check at the end of the year, and for some data like business and charity expenses it might even be a good source for exporting to the tax program, but trying to jump into just before doing your taxes will be slower, not faster than just doing it however you did it before attempting to use Quicken.

Jimmy V

Thanks for your comments. The data I'm looking for in my transactions is to see my spending not just for taxes, but yes, I have waited too long. I have never had this issue in past Quicken editions. After years of unsuccessful attempts I also have never been able to have my checks and credit card transactions automatically downloaded. I gave up. I have to download them "manually" which is o.k., but a nuisance. I have a suspicion that Norton is not letting them into my PC.

I use my debit card on the majority of my "checking account" transactions which always have had a payee listed when I import the data file. Yes, I do have to manually enter all the numbered check entries. That's o.k. there aren't that many. In the past I have had to change payees and categories to "clean up" some transactions, but this time hundreds of payees transactions (debit card) came through as OC Tax Collector. That's odd, because I only make two payments a year to them. I guess that I will have to manually change the payees and category on each of those entries.

I will definitely check out the renaming rules and see what I can change to help my situation.

Thanks!

Chris_QPW

I should have mentioned something. A QFX file is a text readable file, you can open up in Notepad and see what all the payees are in it. They are the <NAME> field. You should also be able to see the pre-renaming rule payee by turning on the Downloaded Payee column in the register.

Jimmy V

Thanks Chris. I will give that a try today!

UKR

One thing that wasn't mentioned in this discussion yet …
If you import a QFX file into an account register and then delete a bunch of accepted transactions, you cannot import them again. Quicken remembers that a transaction with ID number 12345 was already downloaded and added. After deleting it, you can't reimport. Each transaction has a “FITID” number. That number's supposed to be unique, i.e., cannot occur more than once.

Workaround: If you need to reimport, you'd have to edit (with Notepad) the QFX file and change the FITID number in each transaction. Add an extra digit or character to the FITID number, save and then reimport.

IMHO, it would have been better to manually edit (or use Edit Menu / Find/Replace) each misnamed transaction.
And don't forget to look into Renaming Rules for the culprit rule and delete it before you import or download again.