(Globally?) Abbreviate common terms in Payee & Memo fields of transactions

RayDJ

Recently, my downloaded transactions' Payee text field is getting very long, as they more often precede unique text with very common terms, like "External Withdrawal" or "External Deposit" which increases the field length unnecessarily, affecting log viewing, sorting and reports by sliding more useful descriptive info further to the right, or even truncated. In most cases, those descriptors are obvious and not even useful!

Renaming rules do whole payee field only, and proliferates rules. Why not let us create a global abbreviation any words like "External" to "Extl" or "Ext", applied when the transaction is downloaded or maybe a Find/Replace option to replace all occurrences of a common word or even a phrase like "External Deposit" with "ExDep" or whatever user specifies, for words found in already accepted transactions?

Chris_QPW

Use "Payee contains" instead of "Quicken name is" in the renaming rules to match part of the payee or memo names. Select the question mark to get details on how to use renaming rules.

Note it is the financial institution that determines the downloaded payee name so Quicken has no control over them sticking useless stuff in the front of them. You need to complain to the financial institution about that.

RayDJ

Hi Chris - Even if using the "contains" match criteria, Quicken overwrites the entire payee field, possibly replacing current transaction payee details with outdated/inappropriate details. Also requiring a bevy of renaming rules.

I did complain to my Financial Institution. They said they just changed over to new software used by many other institutions, and they'll bring it up, but don't hold your breath… meanwhile, Quicken can handle this concept fairly easily compared to the many truly complicated transaction processes they must support.

What I am asking is to allow the rest of the payee (or other field) text to be treated as "wild cards" that will remain unchanged. IOW, one rule to handle every time a specific full word (or phrase) is seen in the field, replace just that word (or phrase) with the user-specified abbreviation (which could even be blank/null), leaving all other text in the field unedited, retaining every bit of the transaction's other details.

All abbreviation (or "shorthand"?) rules could be processed prior to displaying a transaction for Review and Acceptance, to aid in determining if the abbreviation rules need updating.

Chris_QPW

How I'm sorry, I misunderstood what you were trying to do. Thanks for the clarification.

RayDJ

I am with you, Chris. It took a few re-reads and confirming use cases to convince myself that Quicken really does wipe out the entire field in their rules processing. Seems bizarre to me.

I've been using Quicken for 34 years, but maybe it's time to look at competing tools?