How to use the Renamings tab
The Renamings tab helps with "on fly" renamings:
- rename payees
- assign categories (expense/income account names) based on payee names
- rename category
- rename investment action
- rename full security name
The Renamings tab helps you to:
- Change Payee Name to a New Payee Name;
- Set the Category, based on the Payee Name;
- Rename Category, if it's present in the source file to rename it to a new Category.
A QIF file does have Categories, so Categories are applicable to this format, so all these three tables will be used for some formats, like the QBO format. There are no Categories, so, Category tables will not be used. But the screen is not changing, it looks the same and it also shares data across converters. When you edit any data here and then you switch to another converter, you will see the same data on the Renamings tab.
How does it work? Let's say, we have an original name, as 'Bookstore invoice', so we would like to change it to 'Bookstore'.
First, we can enter ourselves.
Or we can right-click here and say 'Add payee(s) to payee mapping'.
Then we go to the 'Renamings' and we see, that it was added here.
In this case, we want to rename anything that 'Bookstore' to be 'Bookstore'. We use 'Asterisk' before and after.
Then say, that this is a 'Bookstore'.
The Name was renamed to 'Bookstore'. For example, if you have a 'Bookstore invoice', 'Bookstore1', 'Bookstore3' - it would be all changed to 'Bookstore'.
You can enter multiple things, here again, you can use 'Gas company', right-click 'Add payee(s) to payee mapping'.
Go back to 'Renamings' and say 'Gas Company'.
You don't have to use 'Asterisk', if you want exact Renamings, for example, 'Gas company' should be a 'Gas company Inc.'.
But, usually, you would use 'Asterisk', so you don't have to care about these special characters for the special extra things, you could just clean up. To clean up you would use 'Asterisk', before and after. This is the part, that will be looking for.
And this is the clean Name you want to be, as a final Name.
The Name was renamed to 'Gas company Inc.'.
For example, 'Hydro' we want to do 'Office supplies'. So, to change it - we do 'Add payee(s) to payee mapping', go to 'Renamings'.
And then we say at the 'Category', that 'Hydro' is the 'Office'.
Go back, we see this Category became 'Office'.
For example, for the 'Payroll'.
Go to 'Renamings', for Category - 'Payroll' and for the New Category - 'Payroll Expenses'.
It is renamed from 'Payroll' to 'Payroll Expenses'.
Why we do that? First, for clean-up Names. You don't have to clean up Names, if the software already knows your Vendor names, like that, then it would use these clean Names.
And the second format, like the IIF format - you have to provide exact Vendor Names, otherwise, QuickBooks will create a new Vendor record, you have to do that to provide actual Vendor Names. For the IIF format, you have to assign a category, which is expense or income account, so you have to use this table here to assign based on Payee names, assign categories, so the IIF file has the category already for each transaction.
