I use the renaming rules to get Quicken to change the downloaded payee so that it will match up to an existing transaction (probably auto entered from a reminder) or a manually entered transaction that used a memorized payee as its template.
The trick with renaming rules and it changed a few years back is that the default is looking for an exact match with the downloaded payee and not a "contains".
After creating the renaming rule, I always edit it to use the "contains" condition versus the "is" condition:
Even if you don't use memorized payees for a template for manually entered transactions, the renaming rules will consistently change your downloaded transaction payee to something consistent determined by you. The renaming rules use a combination of the downloaded payee and the downloaded memo fields for the "contains" to look in, so that you just need to find something unique in the combination to trigger its application as in this image:
Not sure why I keep the "Associate" in the renamed payee, but the idea was to change the meaningless "DDA" into something recognizable.
Renaming rules ONLY fire off during the download, they can NOT be used on existing transactions, use the right-click "Edit transactions" for that process.
Not what I said.
When I wrote "downloaded payee", I am referring to what comes from the financial institution and will be put in the payee field of the transaction, it is also put in the "downloaded payee" field for reference. The renaming rule takes the downloaded payee as a starting point, modifies it and puts the changed result in the payee field.
The fields that have "downloaded" in their name are read-only and can not be changed you the user.
As an example, you want to remove the store # from the downloaded payee.
So the d/l'd payee is Walmart #1234. You go to Tools→Renaming Rules
Click on Add a rule to get:
Fill in the two fields, the first field being what you want it changed to. The second is the text we are looking for in the d/l'd payee. Click OK and you are back to the first window with the new rule added (you may have to scroll down to find it).
Click on the triangle to expand it as shown above.
Click on the field with the word "is", then click on the triangle, then select the "If payee contains" menu item. Then click Done to finish.
The idea is to use a search phrase that will uniquely identify which payee is to be changed, but not to include anything that might eliminate them like store #. I don't care which Walmart it is from, I just want to name it Walmart.
It could be that they use an abbreviation like my first example with Dunkin Donuts, DDA doesn't tell me anything, but it is unique enough to trigger a renaming rule to turn it into Dunkin Donuts.
As shown in my sequence of screenshots, the default condition which is not changeable at that point in time is "If Quicken name is", so you have to create the renaming rule that way and then go in and change the condition to "If payee contains" to make it useful.
As stated earlier, the rules have to be in place before the download since it is during the download that they are used.
Explain "but they renaming rules aren't working/taking".
What do you expect to happen and when? I don't think they work until the next time you download one of the transactions you want renamed.
All I can say is that they work for me in R49.33, so the process is NOT universally broken.
You might try using just two words, such as "Home Banking" and make sure that the spacing is exact. Might even try doing a copy/paste from the register fields of Downloaded Payee and/or Downloaded Memo to make sure that it is spelled EXACTLY the way the download is provided.
Here is what is shown if I right click on a transaction that was renamed during download:
It can show the downloaded payee as downloaded and also offers to revert to the unchanged payee.
Here is the renaming rule that caused that change:
I'm not sure what you are doing different, but it works for me at least.
