Can I turn off payee renaming

BH2

I just want to undo the stupidity of Quicken renaming payees. I have a purchase from "JERRYS ARTARAMA DALLAS DALLAS" which was a tube of art paint or something from Jerry's Artarama. Of course Quicken, like mint.com or all other stupid budgeting software, thinks that they are smarter than me and it changed the payee to "Ramada" and sets the category to Hotel. Can I just turn off this crap and only use names as they appear on the statment inless I choose to rename it? Or put an UNDO button on it instead of me having to type in "JERRYS ARTARAMA DALLAS DALLAS" because you won't even let me cut and paste it. I can't even use Quicken to see if I have valid transactions on my IOS phone app because it it too stupid ot let me see the real payee. Of course it will put 1000000 known payees in a drop down that I can scrow for infinity, but not ever show me the real payee and let me get on with my day…. I hope AI is smarter than this, but I have my doubts.

BH2

I just want to download my transactions, see my transactions, and see my current balances. Is there any software that will stop trying to outsmart me or the credit card statement and just show the real data.

I just wasted an hour trying to figure out how I could have possibly spent money at a Ramada when of course I didn't.

I'm sorry you wasted time reading this.

jacobs

Sure, there are bunch of things you can do…

First, as you showed in your screenshot, it should take a second, not an hour, to find out original name of the Payee: you can just open the Show Details screen (Command-Option-E), which shows you exactly what was downloaded from the financial institution.

If this happens often and you don't want to open each transaction, you can add the "Statement Payee" column to your registers. This displays the same data: the name exactly as it came in from your financial institution.

Next, you can turn off a preference for Quicken applying renaming and auto-categorization rules at the server level. Go to Settings > Connected Services and un-check the box for "Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories".

Since that's an all-or-nothing option, the best option may be to create local Renaming Rules as you go along, so that payees which have been renamed improperly once won't do it again. In your example, you'd create a Renaming Rule for "If statement Payee contains [Jerry] [Arterama]"; you can set the rule either to rename the Payee to "Jerry's Arterama" (e.g. eliminate the extraneous stuff like "Dallas Dallas")…

…or you can set the rule to "Do not rename", which leaves it unchanged from what was downloaded:

It may take a small investment of time — less than an hour, though! 😉 — to create some Renaming Rules over the next few weeks and months as you download transactions, and you'll find that as time goes on, you have rules in place for most of your Payees which Quicken would otherwise rename incorrectly.

BH2

Thank you for your reply to my question/rant. I've added the original payee column which will probably solve all my issues.

I might just turn off the 'improve payees'. 20 years of quicken, yodlee, mint.com, personalcapital.com, simplifi, and now quicken again and I all I really want is for my transactions and balances to be downloaded accurately; without errors, missing transactions, duplicates, or connectivity errors. Yes, I will write my congressmen to make banks have real APIs.

I would never have guessed that this setting would be under connected services when renaming rules are under the register settings. If I would have seen that 2 months ago, I would have turned it off before I got started. I used mint.com before and found this all so terrible that I gave up renaming and budgeting 5-10 years ago. I was happy just to see my balances and most of my transactions.

So tonight I started on IOS, and you just can't see the original payee field anywhere there. It isn't there at all. You can edit the payee, but if you don't know what it was for, then you can't. So I had to open my wife's credit card app to find the transaction, which then made me open my wife's email to 2-factor auth, which made me fire up the mac and start all over again once I had a bigger screen and keyboard etc. Open everything up, get into her email, etc. Find the screen shot I included, try to copy paste and fix the payee, which is a link that opened a google search a couple of times before I realize it's a link that you can't cut/paste it, then get mad and write the above rant. It seemed like an hour. So will the IOS app ever update itself, or do I have to edit it in both places (of course not). Now another hour later, the IOS app still says Ramada. It's prompted me for 2 factor authentication for a completely different bank like 10 times, but won't update the transaction I edited on my mac. I will probably just delete the app.

BH2

You don't have to respond. Thanks for listening.