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Consumer Advocacy re:Online Banking Transactions

GR000953DC

One of the major recurring problems I have is miscategorization of downloaded transactions from my bank. It's often a vendor that I have multiple accounts and there isn't enough differentiated info in either the payee or memo to create a renaming rule and the amount varies - utilities.

I wonder if there is a role banks, ACH benefactors (vendors) and Quicken can work collaboratively that sides with the consumer's need for being able to save time in this endeavor.

Seems like each service provider could be required to give each consumer a user defined "tag" that gets transferred during all data flows so that the user tag is a consumer identifiable key that can be used for various purposes - such as renaming rules, etc. Seems like a win-win for everyone. The cost seems negligible to add this feature, and the consumer can opt in or not, whether they use this tag.

[Edited - Readability]

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Comments

NotACPA

Unless I'm missing something, this is a request for action by the FI's, not Quicken. Q can't control the info that the FI's make available for download.

AND, you can always bypass the issue by simply inputting the transactions yourself, before they download.

I do that so that I can see what hasn't yet cleared my banks, or what downloaded that I missed, or what downloaded that's fraudulent.

UKR

Don't let the "Autopilot" (download process to automatically create new transactions) drive you into the ditch.
Use Scheduled Reminders for your recurring payments and transfers.
When you receive notice of a new billing statement being available from your utilities company, record the reminder with the correct due date and amount.
When, in a future download, the debit transaction arrives at your bank, Quicken can easily match the downloaded data to the already existing, correctly categorized, register transaction. No matter how good or bad the downloaded information, you already have a correct register transaction. The downloaded transaction cannot mess this up. And the need for complicated renaming rules goes away.

jacobs

As for your suggestion that Quicken and banks collaborate on a better categorization solution, well, that simply cannot/will not happen. Quicken may be the market leader in personal finance software, but it is a very small company. (Estimates are that there are under 300 employees, and that covers everything across product likes for Quicken Classic Mac, Quicken Classic Windows, Quicken Mobile/Web/Cloud, Quicken Simplifi, and Quicken Lifehub: software design, programming, testing, server management, connectivity management, sales, marketing, customer support, human resources, finance, etc.) Compare that to more than 10,000 financial institutions! It's why Quicken doesn't do its own connectivity with banks and has to contract with an aggregator (Intuit) to handle that job.

Intuit many years ago help create the OFX standard for banking downloads, but standards (such as they are) are now controlled by an industry group called the Financial Data Consortium (FDX). And the FDX standard actually has a provision for transaction categorization. It's called Merchant Category Codes (MCCs), which come from the credit card industry. MCCs are standardized four-digit codes assigned to businesses by payment networks (e.g. Visa/Mastercard) so banks can categorize expenses automatically into broad categories like groceries, entertainment, and services. But even with the MCC standard, bank interpretation can vary, requiring user adjustments to the categories. Further, while Quicken allows us to split transactions to use several categories, MCC coding for a credit card transaction does not — so getting transactions from Amazon or Home Depot just to pick a few — can be problematic. And these categories tend to be fairly broad, with might not suit Quicken users who have more detailed categories. And MCC codes only cover transactions purchased on credit or debit cards.

It's entirely possible that Quicken already employs some of this data in its server-based Auto Categorization Engine (ACE), although Quicken was probably doing this before the current standards and method existed. Quicken has never shared the secret sauce it uses for categorization, so we don't know how they do it or if they have modified their technology over time. So it may be possible for Quicken to get better information to use in its auto-categorization and make it better, but it's really not feasible for Quicken to collaborate with the financial services industry to change or improve the data that is available.