Curious decision to enable memorized payee, and announce it.

Okay I'll bite what's improved?

Automatic memorize new payees didn't change from off to on for me, only change was turning on Automatic categorize transactions, like they said in their message above.

One of my biggest complaints about renaming rules is defaulting to "Quicken name" instead of "Payee contains", but that isn't anything new, and neither is ACE.

If they didn't actually change anything and are just turning on the Automatic categorization setting to get people to use it about as good of an idea as turning on Automatic transaction entry mode to try to get all the old-time user to switch over. But of these settings are on by default for new users.

To me there has to be a compelling change that makes it worth pushing the long-time users that have had this setting off to now turn it on.

Telling me that it is "new and improved" doesn't tell me anything, and as a result, the first thing I did is turn it off.

I guess it doesn't really matter, there probably is no compelling reason why I would want that setting on.

@splasher I think you are right about ACE not being used for Direct Connect.

The truth is when I started this thread, I didn't expect an answer, and so far, I haven't got one.

This is typical of Quicken Inc and Intuit before them. They seem to have the attitude that "The user is too stupid for the full information on how things work, so let's just throw out marketing tag lines.".

Turning an option (or two) back on that have been there for years isn't "new and improved". And the statement "new and improved" doesn't tell the person anything.

But the above message and behavior does sound like ""The user is too stupid to know that they should use this option that they purposely turned off, so we will turn it back on again, and they will be too stupid to turn it right back off.".

I would like to believe that there is more to this, but we have only what they have put out to go by.

I guess we should be grateful that they still let us turn the option off.

Well, I just found one of the improvements. Not that I would have really associated it with this if hadn't been for the notices and this discussion. The automatic creating of renaming rules confirmation prompt has changed:

This might be tied into this…

But this of course isn't "categorization" so maybe this is just another change they failed to document.

I renamed a payee of recently downloaded transaction.

I used to have this turned off before, but then realized that it really doesn't cause me any problems as long as the confirm is on. And it can be helpful.

Just wait, soon AI will fix it. 🤣

There was a post on Bored Panda where they talked about someone with a picture that basically so far away the pixels are larger than the license plate, and they push the "enhance button" and all of a sudden, they have a clear picture of the license plate. And then people post something like, "Yeah back then they couldn't do that, but now AI can do it."

There was a similar post on here asking for AI to be used to solve problems like this.

I think one of the biggest dangers of AI is the fact that people think it has magic qualities.

If the data isn't there, then it is a guess at best.

I actually, saw this too one time (I have been switching versions testing things a lot lately).

So, for sure people should check both the memorizing of categories and payees settings after installing R54.9 to make sure they are what they want.

@Biker6238 Wow!

It sounds like you have solved the mystery of what they what they were talking about but wouldn't just say it!

Having Quicken suddenly remember the payee AND the amount each time was confounding and time-consuming to go back and fix.

So, that is what they changed!

That is a terrible idea!

Whoever came up with this as "make it easier" has never used Quicken!

Hopefully locking your memorized payees can help, but my main suggestion would be to make sure memorizing of the payees and Automatically categorize transactions are off for anyone other than someone just starting out. And now this is change, it is going to be even less helpful.

I can't think of anything worse than memorizing a payee for even single time the amount changes. Since when has anyone bought the exact same amount at the grocery store?

The biggest problem with multiple entries for a given payee is "which do you pick". There isn't a "right answer" when downloading transactions and one has to be picked.

Allowing multiple payee entries makes sense for manual entry use, but not for downloading transactions. This is a case where they combined two different functions, and they get in a way of each other.

I always lock all of my payees and only have one entry per payee. I don't do much manual entry, so I don't worry about being able to up and down arrow to get a category or such.

I don't have any of these, but I also have all my Memorized Payees locked.

Hmm, then I wonder why I'm so lucky.

For what it is worth here are my preference if you want to check yours against them.

I just tried a find and replace on a payee, it didn't create a whole bunch of new payees, but it did change the payee in the Memorized Payee list too, not just in the register!

That is definitely new, and not wanted!