Can't get rules to work (new to Simplifi)
I can't get any of the rules I make to apply to my transactions. For troubleshooting, I created the three dummy transactions shown below, then created/applied the rule shown below that. No effect. Probably some rookie mistake I'm making…any suggestions?
Thanks a bunch!
Comments
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Hello @barncrow,
Thanks for reaching out! I tested this myself on our side and the rule was able to be applied to existing transactions. I would make sure that the word you are entering is case-sensitive to what the Payee is in the register. Also, be aware that at this time, Transaction Rules will not be applied to manually entered transactions within Quicken Simplifi.
I hope this helps!
-Coach Jon
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Ohhh…my test cases were manually entered. That would explain that. Thank you!
Perhaps I just got off to an unlucky start. The set of transactions I was testing on was my At&t internet bill. Can anyone see why that rule isn't being applied?
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In the At&t case, I actually copied/pasted directly from the register to the rules page…so no chance of missing a character. At this point I have verified that other instances of rules are working correctly; only the "At&t" rule doesn't work. Is the ampersand a problem, maybe?
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…and I didn't answer your question. "At&t" is the short name that Simplifi gives these entries in the ledger. It's not the original, raw payee name, but I didn't rename it myself.
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@Coach Jon "I would not know why the ampersand symbol would be a problem."
In HTML (and maybe other text processing systems) the ampersand is a special character that is often used to start special character codes (for example, "<" means "<" and ">" means ">").
When the "&" is really intended to be an ampersand, it is usually "escaped" by representing it as "&" instead of "&."
So it's quite possible that the system doing the matching in Simplifi is having problems with a raw ampersand character.
DryHeat
-Quicken (1990-2020)
-Countabout (2021-2024)0 -
Well, no…it's a weird one. I tried changing one of the entries to payee = Att, and setting up a rule for that, but it had no effect.
I also tried setting up a rule that used the full (raw) payee name, and it had no effect.
I then tried making a rule for transactions Aldi, and that worked fine.
My At&t entries are just resistant to rules somehow.
I'll keep tinkering and report back if I figure something out. I'm sure it's just something I'm missing.
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Hello @barncrow,
Thanks for the follow-up. It is certainly strange that those specific entries would be resistant to rules in Quicken Simplifi. The only thing I can think of is what I shared earlier about manual transactions not being affected by rules. If it is just those couple transactions, I would change them manually, and let us know if future downloaded transactions also behave this way from At&t.
-Coach Jon
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Do you get the same result with At&t if you change the rule to use "Contains" in place of "Exact"?
A while back I had an "Exact" rule that didn't seem to work and changing it to "Contains" helped.
(I had to use the original statement name and add some more words to make the rule sufficiently specific, though.)
DryHeat
-Quicken (1990-2020)
-Countabout (2021-2024)0 -
Aha! "Contains" "At&t" did not work. However, the original/raw payee name is "ATT*BILL PAYMENT DALLAS TX", and "Contains" "att*bill" did the trick.
Thank you DryHeat!
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I'm glad to hear that it worked for you.
I'm kind of surprised that the system didn't balk at matching a word that contained an asterisk.
But, hey… if it works it works!
DryHeat
-Quicken (1990-2020)
-Countabout (2021-2024)1
