Hi there.
Bank Rules searches on Description only. May I suggest if searches also on Payee as well? Some bank imports place a lot of info in the searchable description field, while others place basic info in the Payee field only. Under these circumstances Bank Rules is useless.
Seasons greetings
Muffin
I am curious. What format is the statement? A bank placing descriptive information in the Payee field may be violating the format standard (not that you can do anything about that). The idea is to be able to pick up the payee’s name from that field, not other information.
Some of the standards are quite rigorous, others more flexible. But the program can only be designed to recognize certain file types and subsequently expect correct information to be in various fields per the standard.
Santander
Sorry Tut. Quicken QIF.
You are out of luck, @muffin. The QIF standard uses a P line code for Payee or a description for deposits, transfers, etc. So a bank could put quite a wide variety of stuff in there. Unfortunately, the standard was developed to meet the internal needs of QuickBooks, making it less than desirable for general usage in my mind.
You might look into whether your bank offers other formats for exporting statements. They may have been forced to be a little more rigorous for those cases.
It is interesting to note that Intuit stopped supporting QIF in most of its own programs a dozen years ago, even though they invented it.
Hi Tut
Thanks for informing me about banking standards.
My post relates to the idea of improving Manager by increasing its ability to parse and classify.
Having Bank Rules search in Field A and/or Field B then allocate to Category, is no harder (I assume) then the present search in Field A then allocate to Category, and would be an improvement, giving Manager more flexibility.