renaming rules (Q Mac)

So I am really confused about the new renaming rules. It used to say, if payee contains ----- change payee to -----. Made perfect sense and it worked. Now it says Change Payee to ----, Quicken will rename the downloaded payee -------. This makes no sense to me at all. I cannot get it to work at all. Amazon payees now come with order information so EVERY Amazon transaction now is different due to the numbers at the end. I cannot get Quicken to recognize Amazon +++++ as just Amazon. I deleted over 50 Amazon payees today. Help. Problem with the new rule above, the numbers after the Amazon will ALWAYS be different now , so in the current renaming rule, each new transaction will need a new renaming rule, worthless because that +++ after Amazon will never be the same again. Example, Payee comes in as Amazon3456, then the next one comes in as Amazon4567, next, Amazon5678. The old renaming for this worked. I cannot get the current renaming rule to work on this. What am I doing wrong?

Comments

  • Quicken Jasmine
    Quicken Jasmine Moderator mod
    Hello @wshelby,

    Thank you for contacting the Quicken Community, I do apologize that you are experiencing this issue. 

    Are the numbers that you are referring to included in the downloaded payee information?

    If so, you will need to reach out to your Financial Institution to receive further assistance on how to change the payee from their end as Quicken does not have access to how the payee/transaction information is downloaded. Please keep in mind that it is recommended to request to speak to a tier 2 representative or a supervisor as they are generally more familiar with third-party applications such as Quicken.

    I hope this helps!

    -Quicken Jasmine

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  • wshelby
    wshelby Member
    edited May 2022
    The problem is, that I don't understand the renaming rules. Please explain them. I don't understand the wording. At least you can explain that. Unfortunately, your explanation is passing the blame to the bank. [Removed - Rant/Disruptive] The old renaming rules worked for this. Now they don't. You should fix this, go back to the old renaming rules--that is your problem, not the bank's. This response to a customer is absolutely unacceptable. All you have to do is change the rules back. Since I know you won't, please explain the wording to me, that is all I am asking.

    [Edited for Readability]
  • jacobs
    jacobs SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
    edited May 2022
    @wshelby Please understand that you are not talking to (or yelling at) the programmers, nor Quicken executives, here. This forum is comprised of fellow Quicken users (like me) and a few Quicken moderators (like Quicken Jasmine) who try to help users who are having problems. Yelling at people who are trying to help you won't help. And no one here can change the program code. 

    Now, you keep referring to "the old renaming rules" -- can you clarify when ib the past you're referring to? in Quicken Mac, I can't see that anything has changed in the renaming rules since this feature was introduced back in 2019. Have you been using Quicken Mac all along, and you now find something different with renaming rules? If so, please elaborate.

    Since nothing has changed in Quicken Mac, I'm wondering if your issue is that the credit card company you use to purchase from Amazon has changed the way they transmit the Payee name to Quicken? 

    But let's take a step back… You say you don't understand renaming rules, so let's start there. 



    Renaming rules can change the downloaded Payee name to one of your choosing. The top box allows you to create what you want it to search for. You can search "Statement Name", which is exactly what comes from the financial institution, or you can search "Quicken Name", which is the name Quicken's back-end server thinks might be a more usable name. The key thing to understand is that this process breaks the search term into what Quicken confusingly calls "tags" (more properly called "tokens") here: individual words rather than a complete phrase. So if you enter "Home Depot", Quicken breaks it into "Home" "Depot". There is no way to search for a phrase, and you can't use wildcard characters. And that's where I think your problem lies, based on what you posted above.

    If your credit card company is transmitting the Payee name as "Amazon1234", "Amazon2345" and "Amazon3456", Quicken sees those as a single tag. Quicken looks for a delimiter to separate words: a space, hyphen, comma, period, colon, semicolon, question mark, exclamation point, asterisk, dollar sign, hashtag, @ sign, parenthesis, plus sign, equals sign, apostrophe, quote, bracket, slash, backslash, pipe, percent sign, caret, ands doubtless some others. But letters and numbers together do not allow it to discern any place to separate the characters. So if the credit card company sent "Amazon*1234" or "Amazon-1234" or "Amazon 1234" or "Amazon.1234", etc., the renaming rule could search for Amazon and set the Payee name to be just "Amazon". But if they sent "Amazon1234", Quicken sees that as a single word or tag, which is not the same as "Amazon2345".

    I suggest you click on one of the Amazon transactions and select View > Show Inspector. In this window, look at Statement Payee (what the credit card company is sending) and Quicken Name (what Quicken's server may be substituting, using its own version of renaming rules). If neither of them separate "Amazon" with a delimiter, then you can't create a renaming rule to do what you want.

    Again, this is nothing new; I remember discussing it in this forum with the Quicken product manager back when renaming rules were first introduced. He said they looked at using numbers as separators, but there was some reason they couldn't because they have to be compatible with the way Quicken Windows works since both products share use of the Quicken mobile app and need to work the same way in this area.

    I'd also note that other Amazon customers have not been reporting this, so again I think it's specific to your credit card company and they way they are formatting transactions from Amazon. You may want to try contacting their customer support to complain about this; things can and do get changed, but it may not be easy to get to talk to someone knowledgeable about their export to Quicken who can dig into this.

    Meanwhile, if you reach a dead end with renaming rules, I would just note that Search in Quicken Mac does not use the same tag/token approach to searching. So if you have a bunch of Amazon transactions which come in under different Payee names like "Amazon1234", "Amazon2345" and "Amazon3456", you can type "Amazon" in the Search box and it will find all of them (along with anything names just "Amazon"). You can then select all the ones with numbers (Command-click on each one), go to Transactions > Edit Transaction, and change the Payee name to "Amazon" on all of them at once. It's not perfect because you have to do it after-the-fact, but at least this saves you editing each transaction individually.


    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • RickO
    RickO SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
    A couple thoughts on this:

    • It's not actually Amazon transmitting the transactions, it's the credit card bank to which the Amazon transactions have been charged. I don't see this issue on the card that I use for Amazon.
    • Quicken can "improve" the payee name, which may not help in this case. In Preferences > Connected Services, the OP may want to toggle the setting "Automatically improve ...payee names..." to the opposite of how it's set now to see if that helps.

    Quicken Mac Subscription; Quicken Mac user since the early 90s
  • jacobs
    jacobs SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
    Thanks, @RickO. I updated my post to edit a few words where I conflated Amazon and the credit card company. You're correct that it's the credit card company which is formatting the transactions, not Amazon. And thanks for confirming that you're not seeing this behavior with your credit card company on Amazon transactions.
    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
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