I use automatic pre-authorized bill payments for a number of recurring bills. When I download transactions from my bank into Quicken, they all come down with Payee being "Pre-authdebit" and the automatically entered "Category" and "Memo" being the same as the last such transactions (which of course is wrong most of the time). So I have to manually change the Category and Memo individually on each one as I accept these transaction.
Is there a trick to make Quicken differentiate between the many "Pre-authdebit" transactions when it downloads them so it automatically enters the correct Category and Memo?
Are you talking about authorizing a payee to electronically take funds from your payment account each month to pay your bill?
And are you saying that nowhere in the resulting transaction in your real-world payment account is there any text unique enough to identify the payee?
If there is no way to identify the payee in the downloaded transaction, I think there is no way to get the transaction automatically categorized if you Accept is as a New transaction.
[You can stop Quicken from assigning the wrong category and memo by removing any memorized transactions for "Pre-authdebit" and making sure "auto memorize" is turned off. But that will just insure that new transactions for that payee do not get any category or memo assigned.]
I'm guessing you know the payee and amount before the transaction clears the payment account, so you could start by having a Quicken Scheduled Transaction for such an occurrance. If the amount is the same each time, you could have Quicken automatically enter the transaction for you; if the amount is different, have Quicken remind you to enter ... and you modify the amount at that time.
When the downloaded transaction arrives, you should already have a transaction in your Quicken register for that transaction. If Quicken doesn't match the two for you, use Manual Match to match them. The pre-existing register transaction will retain the category and memo from its Scheduled Transaction.
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