Automatically categorize payee?

[Cyrix]

I import my bank statements into YNAB about twice a month. As you might expect, I shop at a lot of the same places each month, so I'd like to automatically categorize payees. Luckily, YNAB offers this feature, except... it doesn't seem to work? Every time I go into the payee settings, YNAB seems to remember that I set it to automatically categorize the payee, but AFAICT it does not actually do so. Has anyone else experienced this?

[RodeoClown]

Is the payee being matched to something else first?
The other thing to check is if the payee is exactly the same, or if it has a few other digits after it.

Cheers,
-Ian

[Cyrix]

Thank you for the response, it's nice to hear directly from a developer! I'm not sure what you mean by "matched to something else first", but the transactions are not being automatically categorized at all. I don't see any difference in the payee name, including numbers.

On this topic, to make the interface more user-friendly, telling YNAB to automatically categorize a payee should be applied to all unapproved transactions immediately. E.g. if I have five transactions from Steam, and tell YNAB to automatically categorize Steam as "Video Games", all five transactions should immediately have the video game category applied, but this does not happen.

[RodeoClown]

It will happen from then on, but yeah, it's not applied if the transactions are already in YNAB.
If you aren't seeing the transactions being applied it might be worth contacting support, who can help determine what's going on better than I can on these forums :)

http://ynab.me/contactus

Cheers,
-Ian

[Cyrix]

I hope you agree it should be applied even to transactions that are already in YNAB.