on downloaded transactions, some payees have too many characters (Q Mac)

Rick Giles

when I download credit card transactions, many times the payees have so many characters (numbers after the names) that quicken for Mac recognizes the same payee from last month as a different payee this month, resulting in a year-end report that shows 12 different payees for the year, necessitating a complete manual adjustment of the report. I discovered that in some cases, I have 50 or more payees listed in the "payees and rules" for the same payee. Restricting the number of characters for payees would alleviate this problem. Is there a way?

jacobs

This is what Renaming Rules are for. Let's say you have these payees:

Target Anytown 2022-03-08 Store 12345
Target Anytown 2222-03-06 Store 98765

Clearly, you'd want them both to just be “Target." So in Payees & Rules > Renaming Rules, you'd click + to create a new rule, and set it like this:

After this, any payee which contains “Target” will be renamed to simply be “Target.”

Be careful with your rules not to create unintended problems. For instance, if you had a similar problem with Home Depot, you wouldn't want a rule for anystatement payee with “Home” to be “Home Depot”, because then “Home Place” and “Everything for the Home” would be renamed “Home Depot.”

This all said, there's one potential fly in the ointment. The renaming rules works by creating word “tokens” from the text you supply. So “Home Depot” becomes two tokens “Home” “Depot”. If there is not some delimiter to separate the key word(s) from the meaningless numbers, then you can't create a renaming rule. A delimiter is a space, punctuation, dash, slash, etc. But if the downloaded payee name is something like “Target12345”, a renaming rule for “Target” won't match it.