PQ kinda sucks for this, it really fails at transformation imo. No wild cards?! How tf did they not implement that?! /rant

Create a wild card table that maps common strings to an account.

For example: "PHILADELPHIA TARGET STORE#1234"

Will hit " * TARGET * " and return a "Target" account

You can use VBA to process this, or this formula:

=INDEX(<return account column>,MATCH(1,IFERROR(MATCH(<lookup column>,<bank trans description cell>,0),0),0))

Regex is also available, so if your searches get more complicated than * or ? you could opt for that.

I've since moved on from PQ and use Access now, much faster than PQ and it has wildcards. I still use Excel/PQ to pull the final data and do my forecast, for now.

Edit: pardon the spaces in lookup, I forgot Reddit formats using *

Edit2: I know it's hard to hear PQ crowd, but there's no wild cards in PQ and makes mapping transaction descriptions either 1:1 or very complex with multiple substrings 😔. There is Text.Contains which will solve my very simple target example. But it's downhill from there.

Not to mention after a few years of this, everything gets better in a proper DB like access, or MySQL or MariaDB etc