In Q2003 H&B I have one credit card account for which I download monthly transactions. How can I get Quicken to do a better job of categorizing them? As it is now, it apparently picks a category at random. I know it would have no way of knowing how to categorize a transaction it had never seen before, but may transactions are recurring events from the same vendor and all get the same category. I manually recategorize them every month, but Quicken doesn't seem to remember. I figure if it tries to categorize them, then there must be a mechanism for fine tuning the categories.
Your Quicken transactions can get categorized in several ways ... none of them are "random" (except, possibly, your manual entries :)).
Obviously, you can manually enter the category each time, as you seem to be doing now. But Quicken will apply categories automatically under several different sets of circumstances.
When you manually enter transactions, Quicken can suggest categories for you if you select the "Automatic Categorization" option. I can not tell you the exact methodology for this, but Quicken uses info provided by a company called "infoUSA Inc." to do this. Automatic Categorization is selected in Edit > Preferences > Quicken Program > Register.
If you enter transactions manually or if you "accept" downloaded transactions, Quicken can use "memorized transactions" that contain categories to fill in the category field in new transactions. If you have no "memorized" transaction for the payee, or if you have not enabled "QuickFill", Quicken will not utilize this method.
If downloaded transactions are not categorized using QuickFill, and if the financial institution included a "merchant code" in the transaction (most likely credit and debit-card transactions), the Quicken will assign a category based on the "merchant code".
The bottom line of all that is that if you want to take control of categorizing your downloaded transactions, "memorize" transactions for the payees in question with the correct categories, and make sure QuickFill is enabled. To enable QuickFill (based on Q2005 deluxe for Windows, US):
Edit > Preferences > Quicken Program > QuickFill
and check the boxes for "Complete fields using previous entries" and "Recall memorized payees".
Also, if you have a group of transactions that have been miscategorized, you can recategorize them all at once using either "Recategorize" (if they were all given the same incorrect category), or "Find/Replace" (the more versatile method, since it can select transactions based on the value in any field). Both methods are available from the Edit > Find & Replace menus.
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