Some monthly payments

harleymon

I have many payments that are made to the same companies on a monthly basis. How do I setup Quicken to automatically set the "category" for that payment?

I thought I setup correctly, however, I still get multiple payments that are not categorized and I have to enter each one.

splasher

For consistency when manually entering the transactions, use Memorized Payee.

For automatic entry on a scheduled basis, use Manage Bill & Income Reminders.

Both are on the Tools menu.

harleymon

Explain what "on a scheduled basis" means. There are times when I use my debit card for lets say "Whataburger" ona daily or every other day purpose.

When I use for that purpose I want it to automatically assign to the category "whataburger" Make Sense?

UKR

Explain what "on a scheduled basis" means.

@splasher was talking about what you previously referred to as "monthly basis".
A Scheduled Reminder allows you to define your, for example, monthly payments to the insurance company. Quicken will then remind you before the next payment is due, based on the settings in the reminder. If you record the reminder, the resulting register transaction will be correctly categorized.

If you have to make multiple payments to the same company, I recommend you use distinct payee names. This way you can easily differentiate between, for example, "ABC Insurance {Life Ins.}", "ABC Insurance {Fiat 500}", "ABC Insurance {Mustang}". Each of these separate transactions will be correctly categorized as defined in the Scheduled Reminder.

Recommend you enter these reminder transactions BEFORE the due date, before a transaction download from the bank brings in payment confirmations. With transactions already existing in your register, Quicken has an easier way to correctly match downloaded data to register transactions. Conjuring up new register transactions from downloaded data and automatically accepting these into the register is always hit or miss, more miss than hit.

splasher

To me, "whataburger" is a payee, not a category. If I had a transaction for "whataburger", its category would be "Dining" or "Fast Food".

I would have a Memorized Payee with "wahtaburger" as the payee, "Dining" or the category and $0 for the amount and lock it so that it did not get changed when used in the future. Then a transaction with "whataburger" as the payee is downloaded, Quicken would use that Memorized Payee as a template and substitute in the correct amount.

Now, if the download's payee is not something that is exactly "whataburger", then you need a Renaming Rule that will change it to "whataburger" so that it will then match to the Memorized Payee. Quicken looks at the combination of the payee and memo fields when doing the comparison for the Renaming Rule, so you look for something between them that will uniquely identify the transaction as a "whataburger" transaction.