Memorized Transactions??

wkern

When I reconcile a credit card and post the payment, it enters an apparent memorized transaction or quickfill that is not showing in the memorized transaction list. Example, with Citi Bank Visa, it automatically populates the payee field in the checking account with "VISA Citi (Costco)". This is nowhere to be found in the memorized transactions. How do I stop this when I cannot find it? This is not new.

Using Release 27.1.55.26 on Windows 11

Tom Young

I'm guessing that somewhere along the line, after a reconciliation, the "Make Credit Card Payment" window showed up, asking if you wanted to "make a payment now" and you answered "Yes" and "Don't show this screen again."

If that's the case then immediately after the reconciliation is complete Quicken posts a payment in the checking Account, using the credit card Account Name as the payee. That's just how Quicken was programmed. I've never actually said "Yes" to this question so I don't know if these payment transactions end up in the Memorized Payees list or not, but if you can't find that memorized payee on the list then apparently they simply are not memorized there.

If all my assumptions are correct then what you need to do is go to Preferences > Alerts & Messages and click on "Reset Quicken Warnings." That will allow the "Make Credit Card Payment" window appear after the next reconciliation and you can make the needed changes.

wkern

I always select "yes" when the "payment now" window pops up, which takes me to the check register. This is where the payee has then been populated with the wrong information, which is not the credit card Account Name. I have to manually correct it.

One thing to note, the info that populates the Payee field is what the credit card Account Name once was called before I renamed it. If that's the case, how to I stop Quicken from populating it with the old Account Name? I can't find it anywhere? It just appears when I go from reconciliation to the checking account. This is with 2 different credit card Accounts with Citi Bank.

UKR

I don't know where in Quicken the "payment now" information is stored and I couldn't find it documented anywhere …

As a workaround I suggest you set up and use a Scheduled Reminder with proper Payee Name and Address as needed for each of your credit cards.
After reconciliation, instead of going the "payment now" route record the Scheduled Reminder.
This way you have correct Payee Name, Address and Memo on your transactions and, should you have to make future changes, you know where to find and change the information.

wkern

Thanks for the responses. For a little more clarity, when I initially created the 2 Citi Card Accounts, I named one of them "Visa Citi (Costco)". I later renamed this Account "Citi Visa". The original Account name is what keeps populating the payee field in Checking. I cannot find where these original payees are located to access them & remove them. They seem to just appear in the checking register payee field when I opt to make payment after I reconcile. They are obviously embedded somewhere in the program. They are not visible in the memorized transactions.

Tom Young

Are your correctly-named transactions showing up in the Memorized Payees list? If not, and this is just a shot in the dark, the next time you make a correction to a payment transaction do a {Ctrl}-m combination key press to force memorization of the correct name, and maybe that'll affect that pop-up's action.

Rocket J Squirrel

I have also experienced this problem. I wanted my credit card payee to be "Citi Cards", but Quicken would set the payee to the name of the Quicken account "RJS Citi Visa 4352" instead.

I figured this was some kind of data corruption and I never found a way to fix it. I just stopped using the feature where Quicken populates the payee after reconciling a credit card.

Tom Young

@Rocket J Squirrel

"but Quicken would set the payee to the name of the Quicken account "RJS Citi Visa 4352" instead"

Is RJS Citi Visa 4352 the actual name of the Account in the file? If "yes" that seems to be the SOP for this pop-up.

Rocket J Squirrel

Well, it's an example of what my account name looks like.

You may be right. My memory is poor, but it seemed to me that for many years, it worked the way I wanted it to by remembering my preferred payee name. Then at some point, it changed to insert the account name instead.

wkern

Citi Cards are Memorized Transactions for both Citi accounts (Visa & MC).

Citi Visa & Citi MC are the 2 Account Names.

Visa Citi (Costco) 8657-8665 is what populates the Checking Account Payee field for the Visa account, as well as the previous Account Name for the Master Card. These are what the Account Names used to be several years ago. I have to correct it in the register. When I go to do so, the correct payees shows in the Memorized Transactions pop-up window. As mentioned before, the previous account names have to be imbedded somewhere in the program. Do you think, maybe, the people at Quicken might have a solution? I guess they don't monitor these threads.

FYI - I've also been a Quicken user since version 2 for DOS. First time in the community, though. Using Classic Deluxe on Windows 11.

Tom Young

Other than what we see in user-facing screens nobody really knows what the actual database looks like.

I just did a quick test in a test file and it looks to me like if you're using the "Print check" option the name of the payee doesn't change, but if you use the "Handwritten check" option, the name does change. Maybe that's your situation, that you're printing checks, not using handwritten checks? If it is then I'd think you could use the Address Book to change the name, maybe.

wkern

I just spent the last hour or so on a chat with Quicken. Here is what was suggested:

Edit>Preferences>Data Entry and Quickfill: In the Data Entry section - uncheck "Complete fields using previous entries".
In the Quickfill and Memorized Payees section - check "Automatically memorize new payees" and "Remove memorized payees after X months".

Edit>Preferences>Register: In the Register Appearance section - check "Remember register filters after Quicken closes".

They also had me do a file validation - File>Validate and Repair>Validate File. Be sure to do a full backup first.

The parting words were: "In theory, that is supposed to work with that payee name". Not very encouraging. No cut and dry solution.

So, we'll see what happens when I reconcile the credit card accounts next month.

Thanks for all of your input.

Tom Young

"Edit>Preferences>Register: In the Register Appearance section - check "Remember register filters after Quicken closes"."

That one strikes me as very odd and I can't see what that has to do with getting that Payee name changed.

As you probably know, within each Account Register you can use the "Filters" to find particular transactions, like checks written to "Power and Light Co." So it seems to me that if you have that Preference selected, did filter for "Power and Light Co." in a register, and didn't click "Reset" before closing Quicken, the next time you opened Quicken and went back to that filtered Account it would only so the transactions previously selected.

wkern

Well, the info did come from a supposed "expert" at Quicken, although I sensed the person on the other end didn't really have the proper solution. At the end I said: "I guess the bottom line is that there is no way to find the elusive former account name that keeps populating as a payee in the checking register". Which is when I received the "In theory" response.

Tom Young

Are you using the "Print Check" option when paying, or the "Handwritten Check" option here?

mshiggins

I tested multiple times using R54.16 and R55.26 to see if I could find the key to Quicken's handling of this situation.  And until last night (April 8 2024), I repeatedly got the same results as the original poster  and was never able to discern any underlying reason.

But last night, I initiated a new test (in R55.26), taking the same basic steps as in my previous tests:
- reconcile existing credit card account
- ask Quicken to print check for balance
- Quicken used "correct" (existing) account name as the check payee
- change credit card account name
- unreconcile one transaction
- initiate new reconcile
- ask Quicken to print check for balance

However, unlike every previous test, this time Quicken used the NEW credit card account name as the check payee.

[I repeated the test process this morning; and again, Quicken used the new credit card account name as the check payee.]

I can offer no explanation why suddenly the tests produced different results than my multiple previous tests.

I think that if the Quicken developers can consistently get this process to work,  they could supply the correct steps to be taken and what conditions must be true for the process to succeed.  But since they've never done that before to my knowledge, I doubt they will now.

Other than my isolated success last night and this morning,  I basically stand by the remarks I originally composed before last night - which I've included below.

=================================================================================== 

The basics of Quicken's treatment of creating a check to pay a credit card bill upon the completion of account reconciliation  has not changed since at least Q2010. 

In Q2010 Quicken did create a Memorized Transaction for the check it created at the conclusion of a credit card reconciliation.  But that did not (and would not) help solve the problem of this discussion. 

Quicken saves the name of the credit card account when the account is first created. Quicken has always used that saved original name as the payee for the check; so even if Quicken were employing the Memorized Transaction, it would continue to "look up" the payee by the original name of the credit card account. No change to the Memorized Payee List would (could) change thenresult. 

The important factor is that Quicken is saving the original name of the credit card account someplace inaccessible to the user,  and always uses that saved name for the check payee - no user modification to the Memorized Payee list could have any effect on that.

I don't know when Quicken stopped creating a Memorized Payee for the credit card payment transaction, but it doesn't really matter.  My guess is that Quicken stopped creating the Memorized Payee because it was/is of no value ... to Quicken or the user.

As I see it, the simplest change Quicken could make to address this issue would be to automatically use the current name of the credit card account. But I believe the better approach would be to allow the user to designate a payee name for the credit card payment (and change that name anytime) - a name that need have no relationship to any Quicken account name, since the name of a Quicken account seems an unlikely name for a check payee.

But, all things considered, my guess is that Quicken isn't likely to make any change to the existing process - given that:

- The number of Americans writing checks is falling significantly Over the past two decades, check volume has declined by almost two-thirds, from nearly 43 billion annually to 14.5 billion

- 46% of Americans didn't write a check in 2023 

- Having the credit card company automatically debit the payment is significantly superior to manually creating and mailing a check  (though I imagine some users will disagree)

For those who feel they must use the Quicken feature to pay the credit card bill at the conclusion of the credit card reconciliation;  the only way I can come up with to address that is to have the user create a new Quicken credit card account  with the name desired to be printed on checks,  Move the transactions from the old credit card account to the new credit card account, and delete the old credit card account.

-JP

wkern

Tom Young - I use the handwritten option, which enters the transaction into the checking register. I don't physically print a check. I enter "EFT" in the check# box in the register. I use my credit union's billpayer service to pay my bills.

mshiggins - That seems to be the case with Quicken, not seeing it as an important issue to bother changing it. But it does seem like it could be an easy fix. I used 13 actual checks last year for one-time incidentals. I may try your suggestion in your last paragraph, although it's not really a big deal to change the payee in the check register. Just an extra step. My intent with this thread was to see if there was an easy fix, that maybe I was missing something.

All in all, I've had only one other complaint with Quicken over the decades that I've been using it, which I brought up in a previous post.

Thanks again for your input. Much appreciated.

wkern

As an FYI - the "solutions" from Quicken did not work. The "phantom" payee still populated the payee in the checking account register. I ended up unselecting the "Automatically Memorize New Payees" suggestion, as it began populating the memorized payees with ones that I do not need to be memorized.

As mshiggins suggested, I created a new account, using the credit card's payee as the account name, then transferred transactions from the original CC account to it. Also deleted the transaction from the checking account register. I unreconciled, then redid the reconciliation from the previous date in the "new" account, and it worked fine. The correct payee name populated in the registers. The only glitch was, I was unable to select multiple transactions to be transferred by holding down the shift key, as in the "Help" instructions. Had to do them individually. Not good if you already have multiple transactions. This particular account had only 2.

dc0063

When renaming the account, did you also change the 'description' field in the On-Line Payee record?

wkern

I don't use the on-line option of Quicken. I reconcile the credit card account, recording the payment due transaction in the checking account using the handwritten check option. That's it. Payment is made through my credit union, which goes electronically to Citi Bank.

mshiggins

"The only glitch was, I was unable to select multiple transactions to be transferred by holding down the shift key, as in the "Help" instructions."

Please post the exact steps you took. 

I have used "Move transaction(s)" to move multiple transactions in a single Move many times; never had any problem selecting or Moving the transactions.

One possibility: if you have told Quicken to "Show Reminders" in the register, and your selection of transactions included any of those reminders, Quicken will not open the right-click menu that offers the "Move transaction(s)" option.

-JP