How do you prevent Quicken (Mac) from automatically changing Payee names?

RJD2020

First, why does Quicken NOT allow a user to opt-in or opt-out of changing Payee names. Not once, not ever has Quicken's "improvement" ever improved a name. When I make a credit card purchase at Green Thumb Nursery, Quicken changes the name to Green Thumb Nursery School. THEN… it also sets the category as "School".

The name of the Payee when viewed on my credit card statement and on my bank's website is shown exactly as it should be - "Green Thumb Nursery".

How can I get Quicken to stop making an incorrect change? I don't want to create "rules" as I don't want to waste time creating rules to undo what Quicken never should have done in the first place.

Leah

I have a similar problem except mine changes to a completely different name - to a payee that's been memorized and the payment amount is the same.

Unknown

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jacobs

If you have not already done this, go to Settings > Connected Services and uncheck the box for "Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories". That should turn off auto-renaming, but there have been reports that Quicken is ignoring this setting for some users.

The other thing you can do is create your own Renaming Rules. Yeah, it's annoying to have to do this, but if you spend a little time create renaming rules for your most frequently-used Payees, you won't have to deal with this on an ongoing basis.

Renaming rules are fast and easy to create. If there's a Payee which comes in correctly from your financial institution, tell Quicken not to rename it:

If you have Payees come in from your financial institution with added text or characters, tell Quicken to discard it. So if you have a Payee like "Home Depot 1234 Anytown 20230420*123456":

RJD2020

Thanks, but this doesn't work. The box for "Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories" is and always has been unchecked. So, as you indicate, Quicken may be ignoring this.

I use my card for absolutely everything and then pay it off each month. As such, I always have new payees each month. Constantly defining renaming rules isn't practical - it's an enormous waste of time and is completely unnecessary if Quicken would just accept what the bank sends or honor the unchecking of the 'improve' box. The payee name is 100% correct from the bank. Quicken is messing it up. They simply need to stop doing it. Otherwise, the easiest solution is to stop using and paying for Quicken.

jacobs

I agree Quicken should fix this. Have you reported it to Quicken Support? I don't know if this is a "known issue" or something which hasn't been documented and sent up the chain of command.

I use my credit card for everything possible as well, and while it's true that there are new Payees almost every month, you might be surprised to find it doesn't take as long as you think, espedcially as the months go on. I don't know how many Payees you have for your credit card account; I just ran a report and found I had about 100 so far this year. (I know that when I started creating QuickFill rules for my Payees, it took a few months of creating and tweaking the rules, but now there are relatively few Payees who pop up from a long time ago for which I don't have a QuickFill rule.)

For most people, the name which is imported from the bank contains a lot of extraneous information. I just looked at the Transaction Inspector window for all my downloaded transactions in the past month and found not a single one was exactly the way I want my Payees named. Maybe my financial institution isn't as good as yours. 😂 (I'm not a good test case for Renaming Rules only because I generally enter my transactions manually and let Quicken match them, so my Payee names are the ones I create rather than the downloaded ones. I certainly don't advocate everyone do this, and I'm sure you'd find it an enormous waste of time.)

Again, I'm not suggesting Renaming Rules as something everyone should do; I'm suggesting it as a way to work around something which doesn't appear to be working correctly in the program. (To me, doing something proactive beats banging my head against the wall and hoping it will get fixed.) If you don't want to invest the time in creating rules, I'd definitely recommend pursuing this with Quicken Support to see if it is something which is, or can get be added to, their list of bugs to be fixed.