Renaming Rules - order of execution if multiple rules match?

thansen

I wonder how you can control precedence of renaming rules in case multiple rules match a downloaded transaction?

Example:

If I have the following renaming rules
Safeway…. → Safeway
Safeway fuel… → Safeway_Fuel

and I download a transaction that contains the words "safeway fuel" which of the above rules will get executed and why (how do I control it)?

Quicken Jasmine

Hello @thansen,

[Removed - Innacurate/Wrong Platform]

jacobs

@Quicken Jasmine This question was asked in a Quicken Mac category, and your reply is for Quicken Windows and does not apply.

In Quicken Mac, the order of Renaming Rules in the Window > Payees & Rules window depends on the sort order a user selects; it can be sorted in ascending or descending alphabetical order order by any of the three fields (Rename To, If, and Condition).

So the question still exists: how to control the order rules are applied, if that is even possible. I'm wondering if the rules exist in a table in the order in which they were created, and are applied in that order; if so, users can't see the creation order, so there would be no way to control the order — except one could delete one of the rules and re-create it to put it at the bottom of the table.

So in the example given by @thansen where there are these two rules…
   Safeway…. → Safeway
   Safeway fuel… → Safeway_Fuel

…if you delete the first rule and then re-create it, so the internal order in the internal table in the database would now be…
   Safeway fuel… → Safeway_Fuel
   Safeway…. → Safeway

…would a downloaded transaction with "Safeway Fuel" be caught by the "Safeway_Fuel" rule before the "Safeway" one?

Or is the order rules are checked in Quicken Mac determined by some other factor than creation order?

Chris_QPW

@jacobs One thing I can say for sure is that @Quicken Jasmine answer isn't for Quicken Windows.

Quicken Windows doesn't have "drag and drop" in the Renaming Rules. I can also state that the "order" that renaming rules appear in the list (which unlike Quicken Mac can't be changed in any way) has nothing to do with which will be picked.

As far as I know, for Quicken Windows, the only thing that will determine which is picked if more than one can match, is that the more specific one will match first. But personally, if at all possible, I wouldn't rely on this assumption.

Quicken Jasmine

Hello @thansen,

I do apologize for the miscommunication and for not double checking the details. I have removed my response.

Thanks!

jacobs

@Quicken Jasmine Thanks. Would you be able to reach out to the Quicken Mac development team for an answer to the question? In what order are local renaming rules evaluated, and is there a way to change that order (such as deleting and re-adding a rule).

Here's a simple and hopefully clear example for the developers. Let's say I have the following two renaming rules:
   If Statement Name Contains [The] [Depot] Set Payee Name to "The Depot Restaurant"
   If Statement Name Contains [Home] [Depot] Set Payee Name to "Home Depot"

I download a transaction where the Statement Payee name is "The Home Depot #1234". That Payee name matches the conditions in both renaming rules, so which renaming rule is used?

Thanks!

Chris_QPW

@jacobs does the square brackets mean match this word anywhere in the payee's name in Quicken Mac?

Quicken Windows doesn't have such a syntax. Using "The Depot" or "Home Depot" would be taken as a "phrase" and as such other than spaces the words have to be in that order, so only your second renaming rule would match your example in Quicken Windows.

jacobs

does the square brackets mean match this word anywhere in the payee's name in Quicken Mac?

@Chris_QPW In Quicken Mac renaming rules, you can set a match two ways. What I was referring to above is setting a condition for the Statement Name, which is the name as downloaded from the financial institution. Quicken Mac doesn't allow users to type a phrase/text string here; it instead identifies distinct words in the order they appear in the Statement Name:

It parses the downloaded Statement name to identify the words ("tags" it calls them here, completely unrelated to normal Quicken Tags; I think the former product manager called them "tokens"), so it depends on a delimiter — spaces, punctuation, special symbols — between words. Where this method fails is if there's no space or delimiter, such as if the downloaded Statement Name is something like "McDonalds1234"; Quicken can't parse the name and numbers unless there's a space or hyphen or slash or asterisk or similar.

I remember asking why they couldn't allow users to just enter a phrase ("The Home Depot") to do a Contains match, and the reason I was told it didn't work this way had to do with having to be compatible with Quicken Windows because Quicken Windows defined how this worked in the mobile app. You're saying this isn't how Quicken Windows works, but in a thread I found from four years ago where you and I were discussing this issue, you said:

I can give a bit of history Quicken Windows is in order. For renaming rules Quicken Windows use to have:

StartsWith:

Contains:

And the Contains matched the characters the user put in, no matter where they were in the downloaded payee string.  There was two problems with that.  One is was "literal", so if a person had rule with "My Payee" it wouldn't match "My  Payee".  The new "Contains" takes them as words and as such there can be different amount of white space and still match.

So when I type "Home Depot", and Quicken Mac tokenizes them into [Home] [Depot], I think that's the same as you explained Quicken Windows working. As long as the words appear in the same order, it doesn't matter if there are other characters, like extra spaces, hyphens, etc. so "Home-Depot" and "Home Stinkin' Depot" would both match.

Quicken Mac also allows a second methodology for a renaming rule, based on the "Quicken Name" — which is what gets downloaded to the user after having passed through Quicken's server-based renaming rules. In this case, Quicken Mac has the user specify an exact phrase to match. This can help get around the problem of how to build a rule for if the downloaded Statement Name is "McDonalds1234"; if Quicken's server renaming identifies that and creates a Quicken Name of "McDonald's Restaurant", you could create a renaming rule to search for the Quicken Name which matches the exact phrase of "McDonald's Restaurant" and rename it to "Mickey D's":

jacobs

@Chris_QPW I posted the message above without pasting in the rest of my exchange with the former Quicken Mac Product Manager about why Quicken Mac works like this.

I had asked about why Quicken Mac didn't/couldn't use a "contains" match on a phrase entered by the user:

"Is there a reason you have to use whole words, separated by spaces? (I clearly don't understand the role of "tokenized" words.)  So many financial institutions mash words together, or words and numbers, or word and characters -- as illustrated by the example above ("PayeeNameXXXXX" where "XXXXX" are random digits)."

This was his reply:

We're somewhat limited by the way Quicken Windows implemented this feature which then defined the way this was implemented on the cloud. This doesn't mean the Mac user interface explicitly follows that implementation so it's possible that some form of what you're asking is possible. I don't know offhand. The issue @Just  Lurking describes sounds like it could happen often so I'm hoping we can find a solution working within the parameters of the way the Statement Name matches work. I do remember that the initial Quicken Windows implementation was very powerful and had lots of ways to match phrases and included "starts with" and "contains" and other operators, but most people never took advantage of that extra complexity and in fact were confused by it. I do know they tore it all out and came up with the design we have today. and supposedly it improved matching for most people — or more people took advantage of the matching now that it was simplified. But I wasn't involved in any of that so I don't know the exact history.

Chris_QPW

Interesting. Thanks for showing me what it looks like in Quicken (much nicer GUI BTW).

As the Quicken Mac Product Manager pointed out, this has changed over time in Quicken windows (but a very long time ago). And as of now there is only "If payee contains" or "If Quicken name is". And his explanation is exactly why Quicken Inc (and Intuit before them, this was already changed by the time Quicken Inc took over) they have resisted all the calls for more complicated matching systems like regular expressions. Very few people need them, and they can be very confusing. And even though he seems have liked to blame Quicken Windows implementation for why he couldn't do something in Quicken Mac, I think the real reason is just the fact that they decided that they needed to keep things simple and not confuse the users.

I was just looking at the help for this, and it does mention that "Quicken name" rules are run after the "contains" rules. Personally, I have found the Quicken name is to be next to useless even though it is the default. Here is the help on it:

One thing I would state is that the concept of "contains" changed from the old "contains". The old contains would match the characters you put in no matter where they were in the payee's name string that was downloaded. Now "contains" means "contains these words", where you have to understand what is meant by "word". Words aren't only separated by white space; they are also separated by non-alpha characters. That is why something like this works:

I do believe the switching from matching "anything" to "word" was the right thing to do. And frankly the "starts with" didn't really add anything to the picture as far as I can see. What are the chances of you having two strings that have the same words in them, but one starts with those words and another just has them somewhere in the middle? I think the main reason for have "starts with" is because the "contains" where it would match anything was almost never what you really wanted.

This concept of "contains" being "words" has some limitations though. When some text that you need to match truly embedded in other text, there isn't any way to match that.

BTW a lot of people would love to have the "Also apply rule to existing transactions" that Quicken Mac has but Quicken Windows doesn't have.

Quicken Jasmine

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20472741#Comment_20472741

Absolutely, I have sent this over to my team for further information!

Quicken Jasmine

Hi @jacobs,

For locally-applied rules, it will prefer the rule with the greatest number of tokens (e.g., words separated by spaces). for matching rules with the same number of tokens, it will prefer the rule with the greatest number of characters. In this case, "Home Depot" is 2 tokens and 10 characters, and "The Depot" is 2 tokens and 9 characters, so it will prefer the "Home Depot" rule (and if the matching rules have the same number of tokens and the same number of characters, it will sort them alphabetically and use the first one). So, it will always be the same output given the same input.

I hope this clears things up!

jacobs

@Quicken Jasmine Thanks so much for obtaining that interesting (and definitely not obvious or intuitive!) information about the order local renaming rules are applied in Quicken Mac. I appreciate it!

jacobs

@thansen So the information obtained by @Quicken Jasmine two posts above this provides the definitive answer to your original question many posts ago… 😉

Example: If I have the following renaming rules 
   Safeway…. → Safeway
   Safeway fuel… → Safeway_Fuel
and I download a transaction that contains the words "safeway fuel" which of the above rules will get executed and why (how do I control it)?

So we now understand that first precedence is given to the rule with the most tokens (words). That makes sense to me; a more specific rule with more words wins over a rule with fewer words. So your rule for [Safeway] [fuel] would take precedence over a rule for [Safeway]. Which, un this case, is what you'd want.

And we now understand that you can't explicitly control the order the renaming rules are applied, but you can manipulate them if you're able to adjust the construction of the rules to change the number of search words, the number of characters in the search terms, and the alphabetic order of the search terms.

Quicken Jasmine

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20472970#Comment_20472970

You are very welcome! It is indeed a very interesting and specific procedure!