Can any one tell me why, when exporting bank statement transactions, then importing into Quicken, that the program seems to use a dice to select the category for the transaction. I have not yet found a way to intervene and override this lottery. Having to go through scores of transactions to check and correct categories is time consuming and defeats the object of the original exercise. Also, one regular transaction consistently refuses point blank to download at all., although this may be a problem with my Bank.
I use the US version of Quicken; there are differences, can't tell whether any of those differences have anything to do with your situation. Response based totally on US version.
The single most important thing governing the assigment of categories is the Memorized Payee list: if your downloaded payee is in your Memorized payee list (and you have QuickFill turned on - see Quicken Preferences), the category assigned to your memorized payee should be assigned to any downloaded transaction for that payee.
[If the downloaded payee name does not match your memorized payee, but is truely the same payee, you can use Renaming Rules to have Quicken automatically rename the downloaded payee to match the name of your memorized payee, thereby allowing Quicken to assign the memorized category to the transaction.]
If there is no memorized payee that matches the downloaded payee, Quicken has an option to do something it calls "auto categorization"; if you'd rather have no category assigned than the one Quicken "auto" assigns, turn off this option - see Quicken Preferences. (Quicken says it uses info from something called "infoUSA, Inc." for this feature, so possibly it does not apply to the Australian version, or perhaps another source of info is used, or ....).
Also, credit card transactions may have a "merchant code" assigned by the credit card company which Quicken may use to assign categories; best bet to avoid this is to have a memorized transaction in place.
Thank you for that info. What you say is logical, and I would think it applies to the Australian version as well. I will go through my register and make sure all transactions are memorised and see how that goes, although I am almost sure that this is happening with transactions that are already memorised. One problem I can foresee, is different transaction categories from the same payee.
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222 9843 body "Brian Bosley" wrote
You can Memorize a payee and leave the category blank, if you like; then, I think, no category will be assigned to downloaded transactions for that payee.
On the other hand; if a high percentage of the transactions for that payee are for the same category, you might be better off letting Quicken assign the category to the transactions for that payee; then manually modifying those that are wrong.
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