Turn Off Auto Category Assign (Q Mac)

susan96783

I do NOT want Quicken to auto assign categories for my transactions. There's a flag for this in the PC version of Quicken. Can't we have this on Mac too?

Quicken Anja

Hello @susan96783,

To clarify, are you asking for the ability to review and accept transactions first before they are added to register the way Quicken Classic for Windows offers?

If so, please take a moment to review this Idea Post requesting this feature for Quicken Classic for Mac as it is not currently offered in the Mac version. If you would like to see this feature added in the future, you can go ahead and add your vote by clicking the up arrow underneath the vote count (see example below) as well as a comment explaining how this idea would be beneficial for you.

Our Development and Product teams frequently use our idea posts in order to improve Quicken and implement new features requested by customers. 

I hope this helps!

jacobs

@susan96783 I assumed from your post that when you download transacitons, Quicken is auto-categorizing them — and you don't want it to. Is that correct? If so…

First, go to Settings > Connected Services and see if the "Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories" is checked. If it is, uncheck it. That should stop server-based auto-categorization of your transactions.

Next: Do you use Quicken Mobile app or the web interface? If not, you should go to Settings > Mobile, Web & Alerts and make sure Sync is turned OFF. Syncing your data with Quicken Cloud sometime produces strange and unwanted results. After turning Sync Off, go to Settings > Connected Services and click the Reset button to make sure the Quicken Cloud file associated with your local data file no longer contains any of your transaction data or connectivity credentials.

Third: open Window > Payees & Rules > QuickFill Rules. Here, you see a list of all the Payees for which you have — intentionally or not — created local auto-categorization rules. (Local rules take precedence over server rules.) You can delete all these rules at once, or you can review and selectively delete some and edit others to have the categories you want them to be. If you truly want no auto-categorization, you can delete all the QuickFill rules here by clicking the first one, scrolling to the end, shift-clicking the last one, and then clicking the "–" icon in the lower left. You will also want to go to Settings > Register and uncheck the box for QuickFill Rules being automatically created when you enter/edit transactions.

I just did a test on one of my files with the "Automatically improve the quality…" checkbox unchecked, and on my next download, almost all the transactions came in as Uncategorized. (The only ones which were categorized were transactions it determined were credit card payments, which were given the category Transfer:Credit Card Payment. That appears to me to be a bug.)

susan96783

Thanks, Jacobs. I already have "Automatically improve…" unchecked. I have some QuickFile rules, but sometimes Quicken assigns a category where I have no rule. For example, a debit to "YMCA" was categorized "Health & Fitness" and I have no rule for "YMCA", and I never use the health&fitness category. Again, this doesn't happen every time, but I would prefer that it never happen. BTW the YMCA debit was a pre-ordered Christmas tree, so definitely not health&fitness.

jacobs

@susan96783 Thanks for that example; very helpful.

You didn't answer my question above whether you have Sync enabled for Quicken Cloud. I increasingly suspect that's why this happens sometimes but not always, and for some users and not others. If you have Quicken Cloud syncing with your desktop file, depending on the connection method, it can automatically connect to financial institutions once a day and pull in transactions to hold for you until the next time you update your local file. I don't know how Quicken Mac does (or is supposed to) pass that local preference setting to Quicken Cloud; if it's not doing so, then auto-categorization might occur if the Quicken Cloud server auto-downloads some of your transactions and applies auto-categorization to them. Just speculation on my part based on my incomplete understanding of how Quicken Cloud functions.

If you do have Sync turned on, do you utilize the mobile app or web interface? If not, or if you can do without them for a while, then I'd try turning Sync off (Settings > Mobile Web & Alerts), then Resetting your Quicken Cloud (Settings > Connected Services). That would prevent the scenario I described above, because Quicken Cloud server would never be downloading transactions in the background overnight. It would be interesting to find out if such a change stopped the auto-categorization of transactions sometimes.