why/how the memo field gets changed on a downloaded transaction with a renaming rule

SetSee

BACKGROUND to my question:  I’m playing with the latest Quicken Deluxe for Windows using a 2nd PC and a restored backup file from my 1st PC, before committing to upgrading my to the current 2013 version—I am cautious because I have 30 years of Quicken data that is very important to me, and so much has changed in the program from the 2013 version to the current one, and I do not yet understand how many things work.

So: I’m experimenting with renaming rules and have gotten them to work for the Payee (as long as the rule is defined before I download any transactions).  E.g., my bank records my purchases at a local store as being paid to “PETSMART MILLBURN NJ” so I created a rule to change that to PetSmart.  When I download new transactions from the bank, the Payee field gets renamed correctly per the rule, but Quicken also places a string  containing the last 4 digits of the credit card account number in the Memo field, like this:

Why?  There is no value in that at all—the account number is on the account for all these transactions and is not needed in the transaction.  Who designed this?  (If anything, I would think Quicken would take the Memo field from any memorized transaction that matched the correct/renamed payee.)  Indeed, in another account, a renaming rule worked as specified and the Memo field was made to match the value used in the memorized transaction.

I can find no help about this problem in any support pages.  How do I prevent it from happening or change the behavior?

Chris_QPW

Renaming rules are about the payee, not the memo, so I suspect the two aren't related to what you are describing.

If you select this icon, you can turn on the Downloaded Memo field and I suspect you will find that it is your financial institution that is sending that account number in the memo (the "Downloaded" is what Quicken got from the financial institution).

The processing of the memo works this way.

If you have a memo in your Memorized Payee that gets matched to a downloaded transaction, that memo will be used. But note that if your Memorized Payee has the memo blank, that is considered "unset" instead "use blank", for the next rule.

If there is a Downloaded memo, that will be used if the Memorized Payee's memo is blank, or you don't have a Memorized Payee.

So, what to do if you don't want that Downloaded Memo? Luckly a few years ago they put in a new feature.

Go to the Account Details → Online Services tab and select "Don't update memo when downloading".

Quicken Jasmine

Hello @SetSee,

Thanks so much for the detailed explanation!

To better understand what’s happening, can you let us know which financial institution this account is with? Also, just to clarify, are you seeing the Memo field get overwritten with the last four digits of the credit card number only when a renaming rule is applied, or does this happen on any download from that bank, even without a rule in place?

Additionally, when working with your restored backup, do you have any memorized payees saved that might be affecting how the Memo field is being populated? It would be great to know if editing or disabling those memorized payees has any impact on the results.

Please let me know!

Chris_QPW

Renaming rules are about the payee, not the memo, so I suspect the two aren't related to what you are describing.

If you select this icon, you can turn on the Downloaded Memo field and I suspect you will find that it is your financial institution that is sending that account number in the memo (the "Downloaded" is what Quicken got from the financial institution).

The processing of the memo works this way.

If you have a memo in your Memorized Payee that gets matched to a downloaded transaction, that memo will be used. But note that if your Memorized Payee has the memo blank, that is considered "unset" instead "use blank", for the next rule.

If there is a Downloaded memo, that will be used if the Memorized Payee's memo is blank, or you don't have a Memorized Payee.

So, what to do if you don't want that Downloaded Memo? Luckly a few years ago they put in a new feature.

Go to the Account Details → Online Services tab and select "Don't update memo when downloading".

SetSee

Quicken Jasmine and Chris_QPW, thank you both for your suggestions.

Chris, I think your analysis nailed it.  I had not known about the register columns like Downloaded payee (let alone Downloaded memo) so thanks for pointing out the use of the gear account at the upper R of the account page to let me add them to my register; along with your explanation, I think that this explains my issue and shows that it can be fixed—I’ve followed your advice to Go to the Account Details → Online Services tab and select “Don't update memo when downloading” — and now I just have to ensure that all my memorized transactions have a memo field so that my saved value is used instead of the downloaded one.

The additional register columns are new concepts (compared to Q2013) in this current version of Quicken, and I had not read about them anywhere.  It’s unfortunate that all the Quicken.com documentation I’ve seen seems to be addressed only to new users of Quicken…  It’d be great if there were a Guide to Upgrading from Your Older Version of Quicken that helped people like me out… We were faithful and fairly happy users for a long time, even through some dark years of bad versions, and we do appreciate that recent versions are much improved!

Chris_QPW

Note that with the option not to use the downloaded memo, you don't have to have a memo in all your Memorized Payees if you don't want to. The memo will just be blank. Before this option was available that was the only way to override what was downloaded (include a memo in the Memorized Payee), but now you can choose which way you want to do it.

SetSee

Right. I thnk I'll leave a subset of my memorized transactions without a memo, as blank willbe OK.