Quicken for Mac - QuickFill no longer works

mac.chinsomboon

Hi there, I have Quicken for Mac and QuickFil no longer seems to work for me. I suspect it's because I have long names or detailed Payees now. (1) is there a way to use wildcards, e.g. Anything like "* CostCo *" gets Groceries category, etc. (2) how do I change back to short names for Payees? Lastly, I can't seem to locate help topics that refer to Mac - just Windows that have a completely different menu structure. Thx

jacobs

What you're describing calls for the creation of Renaming rules. Renaming rules simplify/standardize Payee names. So "Costco #1234•Anytown" can be renamed to "Costco". And then you can have a QuickFill rule for "Costco" to use the Groceries category.

I don't know what you mean about switching between short names and long names for Payees. If you're downloading transactions, the Payee name is what comes from your financial institution, subject to Quicken's server-based or local Renaming rules. If you create your own (local) Renaming rules, then you can be assured of consistent Payee names going forward.

Regaridng your interest in help topics relating to Mac, are you referring to this Community forum? If so, you're correct that it's hard to search specifically for Mac topics. Rather than using the Search on the forum page, I find I get better results with a Google search. Try this: in your browser search box, enter "site:community.quicken.com mac search topic", where 'search topic' is whatever you're searching for. Starting with the 'site' part restricts Google's search to this site, and making Mac your first search word after that does a pretty good (but not perfect) job of getting Mac-related search results.

There is also the online Help that comes with Quicken: with Quicken running, pull down the Help menu to Quicken Help. It's hit-or-miss: there's good and detailed information about some aspects of the program, and sparse or no information about other features.

mac.chinsomboon

Thanks for the reply and the help. I'm finding that Payee names are getting more descriptive with specific transaction data and is thus becoming a unique Payee. Here is an example. I must be remembering it wrong, as I thought there was a setting for more "verbose" Payee downloads - on/off. Thx.

Separately, Brookline Bank and Robinhood is asking me to Reauthorize each time I sync - not sure if it's a Robinhood/BB issue. All my other accounts are fine, even the ones that changed the way they sync. Thx.

jacobs

I'm finding that Payee names are getting more descriptive with specific transaction data and is thus becoming a unique Payee. 

The reason you're seeing that additional information in the Payee name is because (a) the financial institution made a change in their download code to include more information than they did before, or (b) Quicken's server-based auto categorization engine used to strip the Payee name to its basic form and for some reason isn't doing that any longer for certain Payees — or both.

In any case, you can easily create a local Renaming Rule to solve this. Your rule would look like this:

If you're finding this a widespread issue with a lot of Payees, then you might need to invest a little time into creating a bunch of Renaming Rules — but you dont' need to do it all at once and can create them as you go along over time.