I’ve tried searching help & this forum for a solution to this, but I can’t find anything. Here’s my question… After importing bank statements, is there a way to do a mass/batch update of transactions (based on search results) to add a Payee and delete the long string of useless info in the Description field? I find myself spending countless hours updating transactions one at a time to “clean things up” after importing my bank transactions. Thanks!
It is hard to answer, since you did not provide an example of the “useless info.” Depending on what it includes, you should be able to do this with bank rules during the import or Batch Update afterwards.
Everything that comes in on the description line when importing from my bank… For example, a credit card payment to DIRECTV has “DTV*DIRECTV SERVICE 800-347-3 24692160327100797774238; 04899; 4965; DEBIT” in the Description. I want to update the Payee to “DIRECTV” and get rid of that description line completely. Along with adding the correct Account (ie. Utilities).
I’ve played around with Batch Update and tried to understand the guide, but it doesn’t make sense to me and I’ve been afraid to try it in case I do something wrong and really screw it up. I basically would like to search my Visa credit card account for “DTV*DIRECTV” for instance, and then update all those transactions to remove the info from the Description field, and change the Payee from blank/empty to “DIRECTV”.
Currently, I do a search in the Payments screen and find all the transactions I want to change. Then I click “Batch Update”. Then I click Copy to Clipboard and paste into Excel. But it’s pasting EVERYTHING (thousands of transactions). Clearly I’m doing something wrong.
You need to do the selection in Excel by deleting everything you do not want
Seriously? It would take less time to update the transactions one at a time. 
I just cleaned up my list of Bank Rules and added Payee to all of them. Going forward, I’m just gonna ignore the “Description” field that gets imported from the bank. It is a lot of extra clutter on the screen when I’m looking through transactions, but ultimately it doesn’t hurt anything so I’m gonna try to ignore it. And obviously, the info is important for the bank rules to even work. 
So you had the necessary information in your statement to adopt the first option I mentioned. That is obviously easier than having to perform a Batch Update every month. And you will never have to revise your bank rules unless the bank changes the information in the description fields.