What happens when I purge (delete) all the names listed under the Payees Tab in Reports?

bluzchaser

This is a "what if" question...I don't know how I have accumulated a zillion payee names listed under a Report's menu tab, named "Payees". I do not need nor ever want to use a report to see all those Payees names. If I delete all those names, what will the effect be to all other standard reports available within Quicken? I am using Win 10 and Quicken Premier 2019. I've read the Quicken book, and I did not get my curious question answered.

J_Mike

What you are seeing under the Payees tab is essentially a master list of all payees in use in your data file. You DO NOT want to delete any payees in this list. If you do delete a payee from this list, the corresponding register transactions will have no Payee shown - it will be blank.

I have done some house keeping on my Payee list from time-to-time. As an example, I had multiple variations of Wal Mart. Using the Banking > Transaction Report, I ran a report including all the variations of Wal Mart - for All Accounts (including Hidden) and All Dates. In the report, you acan select the transactions, right-click, and select Rename Payee(s), and then enter the desired name. The result is you now have a single payee name - the variations are gone.

Be very careful if you choose to embark on an effort such as this - it is a great opportunity for error. Make frequent backups.

FWIW, we need to get QWin caught up with QMac as regards the Payee List. In QMac, one has direct access to the Payee List. One can Hide outdated payees and one can Merge multiple variations of a payee. The Payee List also displays the usage of any given payee (# transactions).

Jim_Harman

Do you mean clicking on the gear to customize the report and un-checking  all the payees? All that will do is make a blank report because all the payees are excluded.

That list of payees includes all the payees you have used in all your accounts in (I think) the past 3 years.

Generally there is no need to worry that this is a long list, but you can keep it from growing by using Renaming rules for your downloaded transactions and the Memorized Payee list for transactions you enter manually. This will make for example all your future Starbucks transactions be just Starbucks and not "Starbucks #1234" or whatever.

If you want to shorten and standardize your existing list of payees, you can go to Edit > Find/Replace and carefully replace each common messy payee with a standardized one. Be sure to back up your data first in case something goes wrong...

J_Mike

@Jim_Harman wrote:
That list of payees includes all the payees you have used in all your accounts in (I think) the past 3 years.

My impression is that this is an "all time" list - all payees ever used in your data file.

The OP asked about deleting entries from this list. Actually one does not have direct access to the list and thus there is no direct way to delete entries.

One does have indirect access to the list through reports such as Banking > Transaction. In the report, one can rename payees as I described in my earlier port. Looking closer. one can not simply delete a payee in the report.
One can delete transactions from the report - not a good idea as this is actually deleting the transactions from the data base.

Jim_Harman

According to the Help the payee list for customization only includes payees you have used in the past 3 years by default and from a quick check that appears to be the case.
-----

What if I don't see the payee I want in the Customize dialog?

When you create one of the reports grouped by payee, Quicken displays a Choose Payee button that you can click to select different payees to display in the report. Clicking this button opens the Payee tab of the Customize dialog which, by default, displays the payees used in the transactions for the last three years. If the payee you want isn't in the list, at the top of the Customize dialog, in the Date range field, select a date range that covers more than three years. Then try searching the list in the Payee tab again.

-----

Others have reported that there also appears to be a limit to the total number of items that can appear in the payee dropdown list and after that it drops random payees. 

J_Mike

Interesting. I think the key words in the above article are "......reports grouped by payee".

Starting with Reports > Banking > Transactions - I see what appears to be the full list of all Payees.
Starting with Reports > Spending > Itemized Payees - I see a much shorter list of Payees in the drop-down list - apparently per the above article. If I change the Date Range setting to All Dates, the list expands to what appears to be the full list.

Another interesting piece of trivia to keep in mind.

J_Mike

Just did some more tinkering and need to revise my comment above;

Starting with Reports > Banking > Transactions - I see what appears to be the full list of all Payees.

 The Banking > Transaction report appears to behave the same as the Itemized Payee report. That is, the Payee List displayed is related to the Date Range specified. It does follow the article.

bluzchaser

Great responses. Thanks very much for the info. Never dreamed that removal of the Payees names would be such a no-no.