[X4U] OT - Help with Quicken categories

[revDAVE]

On 3/9/05 8:38 PM, "Mark Phillips" <mark at mophilly.com> wrote:

> Well, that is one of the problems. The technology is a bit of a
> simpleton when it comes to making reasonable a guess.  It  checks payee
> as a precise equality. I can see how a programmer might draw the line
> at making a guess on "starts with" or something. I haven't found away
> around it.
> 
> I wish I had a better answer.

That was a good suggestion - I wish Quicken was a better company!


- I found this - have you ever tried it? Seems like a good idea...

- - - - -
From: QIF Master 4.83 - VersionTracker
Location: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/16916
- - - - -

Product Description:


QIF Master makes it easier to enter banking, credit card, and investment
transactions into Quicken.



Bank and Credit Card Transactions: Many online banks and credit card
companies allow you to download recent transactions (checks, deposits,
credit card charges, etc.) into a file in the Quicken Interchange Format
(QIF), so that you can import these transactions into your Quicken account.
The problem with this approach is that typically the bank has no way of
assigning meaningful categories to the transactions. So, if you care about
categorizing your Quicken transactions, you must go through each transaction
you have just imported in Quicken, and add categories. QIF Master automates
this process.



Some banks and credit card companies also produce transaction histories in
QFX or OFX format. OFX is an open standard format, and QFX is a
Quicken-specific variant. Quicken can import QFX format (Quicken calls this
Web Connect) and match transactions with transactions already in your
register. This matching is useful, but if you like your transactions
automatically categorized, you might prefer to process the QFX or OFX with
QIF Master, which will convert it to QIF and add categories. If all you have
available is OFX, you cannot import it into Quicken, but you can convert it
to QIF and then import it.



QIF Master adds Quicken categories based on the description (e.g. payee) of
each transaction. To convert a QIF file, just drop it onto QIF Master. You
can configure QIF Master as a browser helper application for files of type
application/qif to have it run automatically on downloaded QIF files. The
resulting file can then be imported into Quicken.


Investment Transactions: Although recent versions of Quicken for the
Macintosh have allowed investment transactions to be downloaded into
Quicken, in many cases the downloads are incomplete and sometimes wrong. An
alternative approach is to use QIF Master to extract QIF from your
investment firm's transaction history web page and import that QIF into
Quicken. Investment information is not produced in QIF format by the
investment firms; to get QIF you must use QIF Master to convert the
transactions on the web page into QIF.


CSV Files: QIF Master will also convert comma-separated value (CSV) files
into QIF.


Finally, QIF Master also performs other useful transformations on any
financial data it can process, producing output data as CSV or tab-separated
entries in text files. Thus, QIF Master can convert financial data from QIF,
OFX, QFX, web pages, CSV, or tab-separated value files into QIF, CSV, or
tab-separated values files.





--
Thanks - RevDave
CoolCat at hostalive.com
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