How do I change automatic recognition of a payment?

Oldbear68

Beginner here:

Quicken recognizes hardware stores as Home Improvement, but this is from my business credit card. How do I get Quicken to recognize Lowes as a business expense?

Chris_QPW

Quicken can only base the category selection based on the payee, and it is global (you can't restrict it by account).

So, you can't have the same payee be automatically categorized as two different categories, based on something like what account it is in.

There is a suggestion you can vote on for changing that:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7854603/memorized-transactions-or-renaming-rules-by-account-2-merged-votes

Short of that changing you have to decide which one is more important to make the default, and use that, and then manually change it for the other one when it comes up.

And just in case this isn't a case of wanting to categorize the same payee two different ways the way Quicken's automatic categorizations work is the "fully automatic" and then the manual override/user setup.

If there is a payee renaming rule that matches that will change the payee's name this can be used to "normalize" the name like changing "Safeway Store##" to "Safeway" or to completely change it to another name. The main reason you have to normalize the name is because the second part of this is the Memorized Payee list. If the resulting payee name matches one in the Memorize Payee list then the category in that entry will be used. The payee has to match exactly with the exception of the case of the characters. You can find both of these lists on the Tools menu.

If these don't exist, then Quicken will check and see if you have selected this preference:

Edit → Preferences → Downloaded transactions → Automatically categorize transactions, and if selected make a guess of what the category should be based on the payee's name and maybe some information that is on the server.

Note that there are other options like "Automatic memorize new payees" on the Data entry and QuickFill selection that will start to "fill in" the memorized payee list based on what was selected. There is a similar one for renaming rules on the Downloaded transactions selection of the Preferences dialog.