"Gary" wrote
I never figured it out.
I have found that most credit unions, banks, etc., are doing a less-than-adequate job communicating back to their clients the details of transactions. I have tried to change myself and am entering my transactions manually when they happen. Then, when I do an update, Quicken is able to do a better job matching with the already entered ones.
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You have found the most reliable way to get accurate payee names: manually enter the transaction, with the correct payee name, before you download; then Match the downloaded transaction to the transaction you manually entered.
But as I noted when you first asked the question (and as Quicken Help clearly states), Quicken is already designed to use the contents of the downloaded Memo field (in conjunction with the contents of the downloaded Payee field) to rename payees.
What I forgot to mention (even after danbrown mentioned it in this discussion) is that in order to have Quicken rename based on the combination of downloaded Payee and downloaded Memo, you must select the renaming option, "If payee contains".
If, instead, you select the option, "If Quicken name is", Quicken will look in a data base of merchant names that it maintains (after it looks at all your other renaming rules) to see if your rename text "exactly matches" a merchant name stored in that database.
Banks are not obliged to, nor are most willing to, take on significant added costs to satisfy the needs of the small percentage of the customers who use Quicken.
Having said that, I have no problem (that renaming could address) getting correct payee names for my downloaded transactions (though my only credit union transactions are interest income transactions - and none of my downloaded transactions have anything useful in the downloaded Memo field). Here's an example of the downloaded payee from my bank for a purchase at Subway, CHECKARD 0608 SUBWAY: Quicken uses my renaming rule to give me a Quicken Payee name of "Subway". [Note that the downloaded payee name field has a max size of 32 characters, where the Quicken Payee name field has a max size of 64 characters.]