Quicken Autocategorizing Wrong

Partyof9infl

I would like to turn off ALL autocategorization in Quicken because it perpetually puts things in the wrong place and it messes up everything. To the best of my knowledge, I've turned off autocategorization and it continues to happen. It is driving me crazy. It recategorizes random purchases on Amazon to "ballet" and my ballerina retired 8 years ago. I've tried every trick I can find online but clearly am missing something.

Boatnmaniac

The first thing you might want to do is to uncheck the box in the Downloaded transactions preference for Automatically add to banking registers. This will require you to review and approve all of your downloaded transactions before they get entered into the register. It is usually much easier to find and fix any category issues before they get entered into the register instead of after the fact.

The next thing you might want to do is to check the box in the Data entry and QuickFill preference for Remove memorized payees not used in the last XX months and enter the number of months that you wish for Memorize Payees to be retained. It's a personal choice as to what that number should be. I used to use 24 months but I found that some payees were getting dropped too early so I bumped it up to 36 months and for me that seems to be working well.

The next thing you might want to do is to go to Tools > Memorized Payee List. Click on a Payee that you are having this problem with which will shade that line. On the right side of that shaded line, click on Edit. In the popup, remove the Category, Memo and Amount that is shown there. Then check the boxes for Never auto-categorize this payee during QuickFill or downloads and Lock and leave this payee unchnaged when it is edited in a register. Then click on OK. If you have multiple listings for this Payee, you can delete the other listings. Then repeat this process for any other Payees that you are having this issue with.

Let me know if these steps help to resolve the issue for you.

Chris_QPW

@Partyof9infl what I believe the problem is that you believe you have turned off automatic categorization by deselecting the preferences you have shown, this is not true.

The "Automatically categorize transactions" preference is the "last step" in categorizing transactions. It is Quicken's guess if nothing else matches.

If a payee matches a payee entry in your memorized payee list it is going to use that category unless you have the "Never Auto-categorize" selected for that payee.

So, like @Boatnmaniac said you need to clean up your memorized payee list and set "Never Auto-categorize" flag on all of the payees you don't want automatically categorized that are still in there, and locking it so that it doesn't change or get more payee entries for that payee.