Payee auto-renaming - old vs. new behavior

meeotch

TL/DR: what's changed with Quicken's suggested payee naming in the past year, and is there any way of getting back the old behavior?

I've got a file with data going back a decade+, and Quicken would usually suggest a human-readable payee for downloaded transactions, no renaming rules necessary. Maybe there'd be a partial phone number or location code stuck in there, but mostly it made sense.

Over the past year, there seem to have been multiple changes in the renaming scheme: for a while, they were ALL CAPS, then there was a bug where some came up as just a single digit ("2"), etc.

The problem is that virtually none of them now match the many hundreds of payees that have existed in my file forever. I had almost no renaming rules before, and now I'm finding myself (auto)creating rules for practically every downloaded transaction.

The old scheme was never perfect - but it was at least somewhat consistent. (In fact, I only learned about "Revert to Original Payee" once things started to go haywire this year.) And disabling "Automatically Apply Suggested Name" doesn't help - you're still stuck creating a zillion renaming rules.

Chris_QPW

For Quicken to "make suggestion" on a payee name a few things have to be true. First off you can't have a renaming rule that applies. And that implies something, you have to have turned off this option:

Because with it on, Quicken is going to be creating new renaming rules (which may or may not have the result you want).

Next if there isn't a renaming rule that matches Quicken will "make a guess" if this option is on.

But with that being said, this isn't what I would recommend for anyone other than someone just beginning with Quicken.

First off, this "suggested name" is a guess, it is based on some data they have "on the server" of what payee names are what. Being a guess, it can certainly be wrong. What's more, being a "look up" means that it doesn't work for all payees. So, many a times, this will "fail" and do nothing to the payee's name. This of course will then be magnified by going into trying to match a memorized payee, and if you have Quicken automatically creating them, you will get a ton of them in a short order.

So, my recommendation for long time users is to properly setup your renaming rules and memorized payees (and lock them) and avoid all the "guessing".