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Memorized payees doesn't make sense to me

Tom Guild

I've used Quicken for Windows for over 20 years and have never been able to tame the "memorized payee" feature. Quicken will often auto-fill a category for a payee with something I don't want; ex: sometimes at the supermarket I get a prescription filled; so it's "health & fitness", etc. But most of the time, of course, it's "groceries". If I change the category once, the change seems to stick, even if I change it to the category I want and choose "memorize payee". What am I missing here? Thanks.

I'm on Quicken classic R67.10 on Windows 11

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Comments

splasher

Memorized Payees (MP) are templates for a transaction to be entered. If payee is only ever one thing, lets say groceries, then there is no decision to be made, a transaction for that payee when either manually entering it or via download will select the correct template.

If you grocery is also your pharmacy and there is nothing between the payee and memo fields in a download to differentiate between them, Quicken will probably (I've never tested this) either pick the first in the list of MPs or the last one used for that payee. If it picks the wrong one, then change the category after it is entered.

Now if there is something different, then you need to use a Renaming rule that will select the correct MP based on the difference, changing the payee to something like either Kroger Grocery or Kroger Pharmacy and the correct MP will be used.

My advice on MPs is to lock them and have the amount as $0, unless the amount is ALWAYS the same amount.

SaraCrewe

I'm new to Quicken as well, and how I wish the Memorize Payees option did NOT memorize amounts automatically! It seems the number of times you would want this are far outweighed by the number of times you would NOT want this. I don't want to manually memorize the payees, but I also don't want to go through a huge list deleting amounts and locking the payee record.
Is there any way to at least mass edit Memorized Payees to change the Amount to zero? That would be great.

Any suggested/preferred workarounds to this situation?

splasher

You don't have to let Quicken create Memorized Payees (MP), there is a Preference setting that controls that. There is no way to have them created, either automatically or manually (Ctrl+M), with a $0 amount. If I don't use a payee routinely, I won't create a MP and anything that has not been used in 18 months Quicken will delete based on the setting in the screen image below.

mshiggins

@SaraCrewe you can also use renaming rules to normalize the payee names so there are less memorized payees to set to zero. For example, a renaming rule could change Starbucks Menlo Park, Starbucks Palo Alto, and Starbucks Mountain View to just Starbucks.

Tom Guild

Thanks everyone! On a related note, can I tweak Quicken's categorization of INCOME? Does it use the same data as payees? I'm a freelancer and get regular payments from Gusto. I want them to be tagged as "freelance income" but because every Gusto payment has an alphanumeric string after it, I think the program doesn't recognize them as having anything in common, and they all wind up as "other inc".

UKR

It doesn't matter if it's a charge or a deposit transaction, a Renaming Rule which renames any payee containing Gusto to just plain "Gusto" should do the trick. Now all you need is an entry in the Memorized Payee List to describe the income.

If you receive deposits / income as well as charges, you may have to set up the MPL entry as a deposit with a condition "if downloaded amount greater than 0.00" … try and see if that'll work.

Tom Guild

I can't find a "memorized Payee" list to edit. Sorry! I did find and edit a Renaming Rule, though.

splasher

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