Question on Quicken Memorized Payees

featherchaser

I'm new to Quicken and I have a subscription to Quicken Home and Business. I have a question about the memorized payees list. When looking at the list, there are amounts listed. Does this mean that Quicken will put those amounts in when downloading new transactions? Why are the amounts on the memorized payees list???? Where can I learn more about this? Any recommendations for tutorials would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Featherchaser (Sheri)

Chris_QPW

The reason there are amounts is because the Memorized Payee list is dual purpose (maybe it shouldn't be, but history created it that way). When you are manually entering transactions and enter a payee that is on that list Quicken will bring up the memorized payee that matches it, including the amount. This is the feature that came first.

And then the memorized payee list was reused when downloading of transactions was possible. Quicken will use the downloaded amount and even the downloaded memo if it is there (unless you set an option not to use the downloaded memo). It will use the category/tag from the memorized payee entry.

Note that there are also renaming rules to "normalize" your payee names (change Safeway #3434 to Safeway) so that they match your memorized payee.

featherchaser

Chris:

Thank you so much for the info! I've been doing things wrong as far as "normalizing" payee names. For instance, with Safeway #3434, if I wanted to change it to just Safeway, I was changing it in the payee column and then doing Ctrl+m to memorize it. Is that wrong? Is memorizing a payee just to attach a category to it? And if so, how do I just rename a payee? And if I edit the payee AND add a category and then do Ctrl+m, does that save both new items? And where should my cursor be when I Ctrl+m? Sorry for all the questions! I'm moving from Quickbooks to Quicken and there's a lot to learn, but I love it!

Sheri

Chris_QPW

Sorry for the delay in answering. What you are doing sounds fine provided these preferences are on:

When you change the payee from say "Safeway #3434" to "Safeway" Quicken should prompt you that to make sure the renaming rule is going to be created correctly. It usually gets it right, but it is best to confirm it. In this case it should be looking for Safeway (as in match any payee that has Safeway in it. Once that is done you need to make sure that the category is correct and then do Ctrl+M to memorized it. It doesn't matter what field you are in when you do the Ctrl+M. You can look in the Memorized Payee list to see if it did it correctly. You can also lock it to make sure it doesn't create multiple entries per payee name. The multiple entry is to allow for manual entry and selecting between these when you type in a payee, but it gets in the way of downloading getting the right category because it won't know which one to pick.

Example of this renaming rule and memorized payee.