Full Payee descriptions are needed (edited)

RobjWill718

Your Payee descriptions are truncated.  This is a major flaw in your product.  The full payee description is needed in order to make accurate categorizations.  For example, I receive Zelle payments from some of my tenants.  However, the tenant's name is at the end of the payee description, and your system truncates it, meaning I can not determine who made the deposit, nor determine what apartment category to put it under.

The problem is not the bank, because I use other services that pull in the full descriptions.

jpl373

100%. Can't believe this problem exists.

shucker

Seconded!

skltop45

Thirded! most of the time just my name appears and I have to edit the transaction to see the vendor

brookd87

causing me a huge issue, all my transfers just come up as "billpay withdrawal" so I have to log into my bank site to find out what it was an rename it. Very annoying.

AlanT

This really is a huge issue. I often transfer money between various accounts, but the payee makes no distinction between the various accounts.

And they know how to do it since the Quicken app does include the last 4 digits of the account number for each transaction!

Jimmy Glass

So, for "Payee"… I often just use this as a description of the transaction, and it is often not something that came from another system. It would be kinda nice to have a rule to translate the data from the bank to my "friendly name" for the Payee.

Flopbot

@Jimmy Glass , by “have a rule”, are you talking about something different than Settings > Rules? This feature is Simplifi’s way of allowing us to set up tiles to automatically change the bank’s ugly titles “AMZN Mkpt US *TX8K7543567” to “Amazon”.

Are you looking for something different?

jjh

What is the rationale for truncating (and capitalizing, I've noticed) the Payees? This makes the tool harder to use.

EDIT: Well, it sure looks like it's Citibank that's doing the truncating, since I'm also trying out Monarch Money and they are also getting bad payees.

Chooch327

Upvote for this one!

HealsBadMan

+1 for this one, a ton of my transactions come across as "card purchase"

Mangle

I have the same issue on the Simplifi app with check card transactions from my credit union. 

They’re mostly categorized correctly, so the info must be there, but all transactions only display as “Withdrawal Visa Check Card,” which makes it impossible to know who the actual payee was. 

This is a major flaw because it makes almost all spending transactions impossible to use — and honestly it’s a deciding factor on whether this app can truly replace Mint/Intuit or even compete with other budgeting apps.

Here’s an example, you can’t see a single actual payee:

[edited image to reduce size]

Glimmer3721

@RobjWill718 @Mangle @HealsBadMan

I'm of the opinion that the Simplifi team needs to review how they import their data from some financial organizations.

Perhaps this piece of data might be useful… when I look at transactions from my Credit Union in the "Appears on your statement as…" section, whatever is in this section is the same as the NAME element in a QFX download. The rest of the description is in my QFX's MEMO element. I know that Simplifi isn't doing a download of my data as QFX files per se, but it sure seems like a coincidence that's worthy of investigation. Maybe their imports from some financial institutions need to have mapping combine NAME and MEMO (or their equivalents) when pulling in data.

Is anyone else seeing a match between the NAME element in their QFX downloads and what's in the "Appears on your statement as…" section?

Coltyboy

The payee descriptions are terrible and make the Simplifi much less useful. For example, if I get a haircut at Sorek barbershop, my bank transcation will say "Sorek East Austin". Simplifi will describe the payee as "Blvd" (which is a term not even associated with the business name. If I go get groceries at "Royal Blue Grocery", my bank calls it exactly that. Simplifi describes it as "Royal". To boot, Simplifi categorizes it as a "bank"! How does my bank know its categorized as groceries buy Simplifi seems to apply a random guess?

The amount of time spent monitoring this stuff is just not worth it.

freckle14

Currently incoming and outgoing venmo payments include only the sender's name in the payee field in Simplifi. Including the venmo description as it appears in venmo would help to more quickly identify the purpose of the transaction when reviewing in Simplifi.

For example, instead of "Scott Paid" something like "Scott Paid - birthday gift" or even just "birthday gift" would be more useful.

Also, for outgoing venmo payments and requests, including the name of the receiving person is more helpful than my own name (the sender/requestor), which is a given.

Analyze

please add this feature - former Minter.

taoman54

This seems so fundamental. Hard to believe this issue has been happening for years.

AM2309

Just bought Simplifi as a Mint replacement and I'm not even 2 hours into using it and this issue makes it pretty worthless. All my CU transactions are generic descriptors. Seeing as this issue was first raised over 2 years ago and it's still happening, it doesn't give me a lot of confidence that they do quick fixes. Not a great intro to the product.

Steakes

After transfer from MINT Payee field reads "CHECK NUMBER" instead of the description I assigned in MINT.

Helpful agent suggested I use EXCEL to amend a column heading and create a new CSV file (which is specifically not recommended in the literature from Simplifi). I do not have EXCEL, and tried using Numbers to make the change, but the new CSV file would not upload. (I changed the Description" column to "Payee" as an experiment). Frustrating.

bunkzilla

Wow, glad I saw this. Was going to sign up for Simplifi but if this is the state of transactions, I'll pass and try something else.

Samir Anz

Also transferring from Mint. Same issues as everyone above. Payee shows as the check number and not the assigned Payee after importing. I found that eliminating the space between the word 'check' and the check's number in the CSV file under the "Original Description" or "Appears on your Statement as…" column ( the Thirds Column in the Mint CSV file) fixed this issue. ie.: replacing Check 2110 to Check2110 in the Third Column will now show the correct assigned payee in Simplifi after import (Note that the Second Column in the Mint CSV has the proper payee names we assigned to checks and other transactions in Mint). Simplifi has mapping issues based on descriptors in the Thirds Column of the Mint CSV.

Likewise, payee names are truncated in the transactions view. When you go to create a payee rule, on the top of the rule creation box, Simplifi does show the full and proper payee name as it was in Mint and the proper "appears on statement..." content as in Mint. This payee name is however truncated in the transaction view. 

ie. For my checking account: Payee shows as a truncated 'Macy's' after import into Simplifi. Actual Payee in Mint was 'Transfer to Macy's Credit Card.’ 

When creating a transaction rule, the rule box states that Simplifi has the original Payee as 'Transfer to Macy's Credit Card' (despite only showing 'Macy's' as the payee.)  So, the original Mint data is embedded (hidden) somewhere in the payee filed in Simplifi. In the end, my rules perform a loop and transfer the actual payee name in Simplifi (only shown in the rule box) to the same actual name shown that I now retype in the ‘name to field’. 

Oddly, the missing words from the truncated payee name in transactions view  appear in the keyword field in the rule box for renaming.  This is the same for many other of my accounts, such my Amex and my wifes Amex both show up as “American Express” and not the explicit names they had in Mint to distinguish them in transactions views and reports.

Uggg. I am going into a loop trying to find a good Mint replacement.

UrsulaA

To import from Mint, use some links in the post below.

Also, the column header names of the Mint CSV do not ever need changing. Instead change the transactions themselves. Another user made description and original description the same in the Mint CSV for import to Simplifi. This is to force Simplifi to pick up the correct payee name. Simplifi seems to favor the original statement name in imported files from Mint.

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/7024/unable-to-import-mint-transactions

curlyq

All Credit Union transfers list generic descriptions like "ACH Withdrawal" or "ACH Deposit." If I'm logged into my bank, I can see a lot more is listed in the description field. I don't understand why it doesn't show up in Simplifi and it's going to drive me nuts. 😠

taoman54

I don't understand why it doesn't show up in Simplifi and it's going to drive me nuts.

It's because Simplifi truncates the payee description when downloading/syncing. That's what this whole thread is about.

Coach Natalie

@curlyq, I'd suggest reporting what you're seeing in a separate post so it can be looked at.

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/8/how-to-post-to-the-community

Thanks!

-Coach Natalie

Emacken

Partial workaround I found for this: if you create a rule to rename a transaction, the rule function can somehow see the whole payee description. For instance, I have a handful of recurring transactions that go through paypal, and on the transactions page, they all only show up as "POS Withdrawal: PAYP" or some such, but when I go to rename and tick the create rule box, the 'rename all transactions with' shows the remaining words in the title. (Of course, you have to know beforehand that this is one of your recurring transactions, and if you mess up the rule or the rename you have to close out of the transaction without saving and start over. But very helpful if you know you're going to be spending at the same place frequently.)

quick username

Plus 1 for this. The truncating and flawed renaming programming makes the product worse not better. Simply leaving the statement description unchanged would be great.

eecer

Upvoted this one. The random renaming it does can be horrible. I have some transactions that match exactly what’s on my actual bank account with a long string that I can create an easy renaming rule for. Then I have another transaction that just comes through as “Card” and a renaming rule will change all transactions that have the word “Card” in it.

classicspam

Does anybody know how the app decides to truncate the appears on statement to create assign the payee....literally just had "pepboys store #xxx" create the payee "boys"....also when implementing rename rules does it look at the whole appears on statement string or just whatever random things it decides to name the payee as?

UrsulaA

From my experience, the app looks at the entire payee string as downloaded under appears in statement as to create rules. See comment above from @Emacken on Jan 9.

quick username

When I try to create a payee rule I normally have to retype the whole string out because it gets truncated with its first attempt. The renaming payee logic is so ridiculous it just needs to be abandoned and list transactions as the statement text.