How to ensure imported transactions have correct Payee

allegrod

Quicken is changing Payee names causing a lot of confusing for me.

I've ready other posts but the instructions to change settings are for Windows. Even under "File>Settings" I don't see how to ensure the Payee listed on my bank transactions import correctly.

jacobs

By default, Quicken Mac tries to automatically rename downloaded names to simplify something like "Home Depot Store12345 Anytown IL" into simply "Home Depot". Unfortunately as you're describing, sometimes those server-based renaming can completely change the name to something entirely incorrect. You have a couple things you can try…

In Settings > Connected Services, you can try unchecking the checkbox for "Automatically improve the quality of downloaded payee names and categories." For better or worse, this is a nuclear option, either on or off. If you want it not to rename Payees but want to auto-categorize transactions as best it can, you can't do that. you can uncheck the box and try it for a little while to see if you like the results better than when it was checked.

The other option requires a little more initial time, but gives you much more fine-grained control: setting up local renaming rules in Window > Payees & Rules > Renaming Rules. Here, you can define a rule for the example I gave above:

You can also create renaming rules to not rename certain payees. So let's say you shop at Home Goods and Home Sense, and every time Quicken downloads a Home Sense transaction, it renames it Home Goods. You can create a renaming rule to not rename a payee which contains Home Sense:

This is also useful if Quicken for some reason automatically performs a renaming which isn't as logical, like renaming "Vietnam Cafe" to "Verizon". you'd just create a rule to not rename transactions with "Vietnam Cafe" in the name.

Now, you aren't going to go through all your Payees one at a time to build renaming rules for them. My suggestion is that each week or month, after you download transactions, you create a few renaming rules for thing Quicken renamed incorrectly or un-optimally. For a little while, it will be incomplete because there will be new Payees which don't have rules yet. but over a few months, I think you'll find that you can build up renaming rules for a modest number of Payees which will cover most of your regular transactions. You may still get a stray renaming here and there for a Payee you haven't used before or in a long time, but most of the ones you use somewhat regularly will be increasingly correct because you've build up a stable of renaming rules.