For the past few months I have been bugged by Quicken importing transactions that display categories different than I had been using before. Some of the categories are obviously bogus. Transactions with a physician named Kaplan were listed under the “Education” caption (i.e. Kaplan Education). Transactions with our local drug store (with Drug in its names) are categorized as “Bills & Mobilities: Mobile Phone”. Payment to “In Smyle Dental” (a dentist) was listed under “Gifts & Donations.” Payment to a large grocery store is listed as “Food & Dining:Coffee Shops.”
I had assumed those categories were some kind of standard set by the payment industry, but when I compared Quicken categories they did not match those listed on my credit card or those in my local bank. All three were different, some categories reasonable, some ridiculous. When I checked in the “Quicken Community” a helpful commentator explained there was no standard. Apparently everybody creates their own categories to suit their customers or … more likely … their own internal bureaucracies. How are categories chosen when I download transactions and how can I change them? — Quicken
You also see the Popup when you enter a new transaction manually. You don’t see any popup when new entries are imported, and Quicken doesn’t if the name of the payer/payee is changed. The bottom line is that you have to check at the end of the year (or whenever you do your taxes or budget) to see if anything significant has changed since your last accounting period.
I first ran into this problem last year when a couple of regular payments we received did not show up in my tax totals because they came in differently causing Quicken to them imported them in a different way that put them under another category that was not added into my income. That’s what worries me – that Quicken’s import processing could “hide” payments in places you don’t notice, causing errors in my taxes. Last year I only caught the error by making an extra review of my Quicken files.
I think that’s only partially a Quicken problem, though. When we had a Amex card, one of the “features” was that purchases were pre-categorized for us. We could always change them when they arrived in Quicken, but it was a bit of a pain point.
Unless you have many thousands of entries in your Quicken file for a given year, I’d think it would be a good practice to make that extra review.
I think an easy way to address this would be to make a transaction report sorted and subtotaled by category, and constrain it to the tax year you are working on. If, in the case you mention, a couple of regular payments landed in the wrong spot, they will stand out in a report like that, and would be easily fixed.
Thanks. Can the category of a single transaction be changed multiple times times as it goes through different processors? E.g., if I pay my pharmacy with my bank debit card, could the bank change the category from the bank, and could Quicken change it a second time when downloading the transaction?
In the case of the two regular payments, they didn’t land in the wrong spot, they didn’t show up at all in the categories that Quicken was displaying. I think they became transfers which were not shown in that display.
Transfers are tough. Quicken handles a transfer as though it were a category, which makes it difficult to assign an actual category to it.
The estate I’m administering has sprouted several expense and income accounts that live on their own until they generate a checking account transaction. Ultimately everything has to go through the checking account, but I’ve needed to track things like a home equity loan, expenses, and various amounts owed the estate.
The unfortunate thing is that items that flowed back through the checking account from those side accounts are all transfers, and Quicken won’t allow me to change the category on them. I hit on using a cash flow statement that tracks all the inflows and outflows for the various accounts. It shows me the totals, and I can double-click on any figure in the report to get the detail for it.
If you include the account transfers you need in the definition for a custom cash flow report, you might get what you want, Jeff.
I’ve noted that Quicken Transfers can get weird. I sell PDF editions of a book online through an affiliate of Paypal that takes out a couple of fees and every sale turns into five transitions on Paypal. We have three credit card accounts at Bank of America, and for unknown reasons Quicken always takes out payments twice on one of the accounts; I have to drag and drop manually to make the duplicate charge go away. I worked out a way to keep track of accounts receivable after I sound out bills, but it requires doing a hand entry of the receivable, then doing a drag and drop of receivable onto the imported payment to my bank. That makes the the receivable entry go away, but does balance the accounts.
Thankfully I don’t have anything as messy-sounding as the estate. But we do run up a lot of messy little charges over a year. I just counted a total of 1090 transactions during Calendar 2023. There’s just so much I can keep track of.