Costco Anywhere Visa Card by Citi- I want downloaded payee names, not Quicken names (Q Mac)

Jwalt313

Quicken keeps changing the downloaded payee names to Quicken names which I do not want. All of my other accounts are downloading the bank's payee names except for Costco Anywhere Visa Card by Citi. The Quicken names are much too broad and not specific enough. I have to manually change them with every download which is getting tedious. It is the only account that this is happening to.

jacobs

That sounds unusual. The first thing I'd do is to click on a few of the transactions in the Costco Account and select View > Show Inspector. Look near the bottom of that window for "Statement Payee". This is the Payee name which the credit card company is sending to Quicken. If you find these names are the "too broad" variety, then your complain is with the credit card company; if the "Statement Payee" names contain the detail you're looking for but the "Quicken Name" above it does not, then for some reason Quicken's servers are doing some Payee renaming.

First, check the preference in Settings > Connected Services for "Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories" and see if it is unchecked. There have been some user reports of Quicken ignoring this setting and performing server-based renaming anyway. If that's the case for you, you can either wait for them to fix this or…

You can set up local renaming rules to essentially override what Quicken is doing with its server-based renaming. Go to Window > Payees & Rules > Renaming Rules. Click the + icon to create a new rule. Enter te base word or words in a Payee name, and then pull down the "Set payee name to" menu to select "Do not rename". You'll need to repeat this for any Payees you use on a recurring basis, but for most people, creating somewhere between a half dozen and a dozen such rules will circumvent the renaming problem for most frequently used payees.

Jwalt313

Thanks for your reply. The statement payee names thru Inspector are the same names as appear when I right click and choose "revert to downloaded payee name" and the same names if I add the statement names column to my transactions page. Those are the names that I want. I do have the correct setting unchecked. Now today, I updated the online data, got the Quicken names again, right clicked and changed all of the Citibank Quicken names to the downloaded payee names as I do every day. When I went to update the online data again this afternoon, 45 entries from last week reappeared in the Quicken naming format thereby duplicating all of my corrected transactions with the incorrect format. It is only happening with Citibank. All of my other banks are in the correct format. I already have renaming rules from before and everything worked fine before. This only started happening a few weeks now

Jon

What connection method are you using to connect to Citi? If you're using Quicken Connect, try switching to Direct Connect.

Also, do you have Mobile Sync enabled in settings? If you don't use the Quicken app on a mobile device and you don't use Quicken on the Web, then try turning that off as well.

Doing both of those things will stop your Costco Citi card transactions from passing through Quicken's cloud service, and might help keep your payee names from being changed.

Jwalt313

I tried to connect with direct connect but it only gives me the choice of Quicken Connect.
I do not have mobile sync enabled and don’t use Quicken on the web
I just updated my Citibank account again and the “do not rename” seems to be working but it also just duplicated random transactions from a few days ago.

Jon

For Citi credit cards, select "Citi Cards" as the financial institution. It's what I use for my Citibank credit cards (including the Costco Visa) and works with Direct Connect.

jacobs

I'd also note that Qucken has acknowledged a bug with the Setting for "Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories" being igonored in some cases, so it's possible there may be a fix for what you're experiencing in an upcoming release.