Renaming Rules, Memorized Payees Cannot get Social Security to work

Bione

For years I have been manually entering all the split categories for my wife's and I SSA deposits. Finally, SSA sent header names that I could key off of. I tried again to get a match to get the values entered automatically. Today I was even on a call for over an hour with a tech trying to get it to work. First is what the bank transaction log shows for a few months. Prior to January the splits were manually entered.

So now we tried to limit the Renaming Rules to just xxxxx2216A and xxxxx2216B. Here is the setup.

Then the Memorized Payee for my desired transaction change is as follows:

As you can see from the transaction list the Payee Name does not change nor the split automatically inserted. I do have other accounts like pension payments this does work for. But not the US Government via Bank of America.

Tom Young

Your SS deposits and the various withholds from the gross amount typically only change once a year, and the deposit date doesn't change from month to month. The easiest way, by far, to get this right without even having to think about it is to set up income Reminders for you and your spouse and have the Reminders set to automatically enter your checking Account register some days before the deposit gets made.

Once each year I go through this process and then don't even think about it until the information changes a year later. Here's the next expected deposit sitting in my checking Account register:

and it will work perfectly, just as it has for years.

Chris_QPW

I agree with @Tom Young that two reminders are the easiest way to do this, but I will tell why the renaming rule doesn't kick in. "Payee Contains" is a bit misleading. It will not find "embedded text". It looks for "words".

Your xxx… seems to be prefixed by id: with no space in between.

Here is a test case with mine and my wife's. For my wife I used XXXXXX6216 and for mine 6030. Notice unlike yours there is a space between ID: and the number.

Payee, then Downloaded Payee:

Bione

I understand the Calendar concept but it is sort of wanting to win on this one. I have even changed one of the accounts to just the isolated string ID:XXXXX2216B and I even set another one to just match SSA. It still did not work. Something else is going on that I am not seeing. Do any of the check boxes under Downloaded Transactions - Renaming Rules need to be selected ?

Chris_QPW

Well for certain this one has to be selected:

Chris_QPW

I just did a few tests. For what you were doing not having the ID: in the renaming rule was correct because it seems that the : is treated as a "word separator".

I don't know why it isn't working for you, but the reminders are the best way to go.

Bione

Duh ! 😖😖It was turned off. Even the Tech missed that. Not directly sure how that happened. I was not even aware of those settings until I looked at a Help page today on making rules. In December it appeared to work for other items. Messing with short strings was my original problem. I did have a blow up about Jan 5th with the Budget Planner losing all my new year settings. Others had the same issue and was told to turn off Sync because of known issues. Turned it back on and Voila! It worked as advertised with a whole word string. Sorry to make you do such good work. As sometimes I say, something was disobeying the Law's of Physics.

Boatnmaniac

@Bione - Glad to hear you got it figured out. I just wanted to say that I agree that setting up and using Income Reminders is perhaps a better tool to use than Memorized Payees is for one important reason: With Reminders future planned deposits (and the category splits data) will populate in Tax Planner and in Budget projections. It can also be used to provide future checking account income and balance visibility. Memorized Payees can work well if all you want is the historical data but it fails to provide any kind of future outlook. Of course, the choice of how to use Quicken is entirely yours.