Transfer transactions in download are not recognized as such
SandraStowell
Member ✭✭
Quicken Deluxe Version R11.18 on Windows 10, all available updates. One of several ongoing problems/irritations is that none of my payments & transfers between accounts are recognized as transfers by Quicken. The downloaded transactions has "Withdrawal - Online Banking Tran" in payee field & the memo field reads "Withdrawal - Online Banking Transfer To xxx " where xxx is the account number. But this is ignored by Quicken.
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Quicken does have a "guessing" transfer detection. It does a guess based on the amount and the approximate date.
Edit -> Preferences -> Transfer detection
Given that it is a guess I suggest that you have confirm selected if you use this feature.
The BEST way to ensure that you get it as a transfer is to entry the transfer yourself before the transactions are downloaded, and match the downloaded transactions to this manual entry.
When transactions are downloaded from Quicken, they are noted as they have been transferred from one account over to another. And as you mentioned, it seems to be ignored.
However, it is just a placemarker when it says that it is a transfer. It will still need to be manipulated in order to show the true transfer from one account to another.
For example:
The transaction:
Would need to be changed to an account by edting the transaction and changing the category to a bracketed account, for example:
NOTE: This issue is for both Windows and Mac versions of Quicken.
Hope this helps.
Respectfully,
~ Quicken Harold.
Community Moderator
Quicken has done much better at identifying transfers in the past, matching both the from & to transactions. Now this just never happens. Note that I am downloading both the from & to transactions at the same time, they do have the same date, and are for matching $ amounts.
Most of my transfers are within one institution, others are all accounts defined in Quicken.
Looking for the word "transfer" and also number strings to match the account numbers defined in Quicken would seem to be useful for guesswork: smart matching which is so common in software these days. And much smarter guesswork than having Quicken ask if it should rename transactions labeled "Check" to each new Payee I manually enter, even though I have selected "Never Rename" this payee in preferences!!!
I find Quicken becomes less & less convenient, rather than improving over time.
Edit -> Preferences -> Transfer detection
and confirm selected if you use this feature.
In my case these have been working well. All my payments (Transfers) are from one PNC checking account. If it has cleared PNC and has not cleared the target account it will not find a match. But once it clears both accounts you can use the "find matching transaction" to go to the other account and see that it a match. It works to go back to the original account as well. My concern is that something got changed recently and the DownloadIDs are not there now on a lot of these and they were before. I'm still looking at it to figure out how to manage it.
In any case that would be a feature request (for a feature request are submit a NEW POST marked as an Idea.), and you are describing what does sound like a bug if if worked in the past and now isn't.
Typically, this happens to me on credit card payments where I use auto-pay to have Quicken pay the credit card company directly from my checking account. When I do this, I'm entering the transaction as a "transfer" from checking to the appropriate credit card account.
When the download comes in, quicken changes the transaction from a transfer to some other transaction category (seemingly from memorized categories). I don't ever catch this until I'm reconciling my credit card statement.
This worked fine for years. It broke in Fall of 2018.
Are you automatically accepting downloaded transactions into your registers?
If you are relying on Quicken to automagically fill your account registers from downloaded transactions, you will run into problems. Despite all efforts by the Quicken programmers, the "Autopilot" (that's my name for the part of the Quicken program which processes downloaded transactions and converts them into new register transactions) is not infallible. For that process to work 100% of the time one would need a crystal ball because the information downloaded from the banks often is just too terse and cryptic.
You should, at least for a while, turn off the "automatically accept downloaded transactions into registers" setting to gain better control over what is downloaded and what to do with it. Review each downloaded transaction, make changes if necessary (e.g., to get a payee name = "Starbucks" instead of "POS TRANS 070116 STARBU" or to assign a category) before you click to accept each transaction.
Any changes you make to downloaded Payee Names are remembered in Renaming Rules.
Any other changes you make (add/change Category or Memo text) are remembered in the Memorized Payee List.
Next time the same transaction for this Payee comes along, Quicken should remember and give you a better new register transaction.
In case you have issues with transfer transactions not being generated correctly:
My recommendation is to manually enter transfer transactions into your register before you download transactions from the bank which contain the transfer confirmations. For recurring transfers use scheduled reminders and enter them a day or two before the due date. Be sure to use distinct Payee Names for each transfer / credit card payment to avoid confusing Quicken - memorized payee entries.
That takes the guesswork out of the Autopilot's process. Because a correctly entered transfer transaction already exists in your account registers, the Autopilot should just match the downloaded transfer transaction to the existing one in both accounts.
Where are the "Auto-accept downloaded transaction" settings?
There are two places where this is controlled in Quicken for Windows:
- Globally, for all accounts, in Edit / Preferences / Downloaded Transactions
- For each account individually, the global setting can be overridden from the Edit Account Details screen, Online Services Tab. Look for blue text "Automatic Entry is: ON / OFF". Click the text to change the setting.