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Best Way to Fix Payee's Everywhere in System (is there one place??)

BRETTB

I want to fix my payee's Names everywhere (already entered) and fix the memorized and Bill and Income Reminders (already setup) in system.

I have found over time my data is having slightly different formats in my system and I may have the same version of the same payee multiple times with slight differences.

I thought I could go through the memorized list to fix but I don't think it's fixing data already in registers? If I do a find entries on a search and then change the payee's so that are all the same then it's adding another entry into memorized list, where I have to go in and reanalyze on ones I want to keep/delete/change.

I'm trying to clean up my data quickly.

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Accepted answers

J_Mike

Have spent many hours cleaning up the Patee list. The procedure I have used is tedious - but works.
The first note is that this is a golden opportunity to shoot yourself in the foot so make frequent backups along the way - give yourself a way to retreat in the event of an error.

I have used the Reports > Banking > Transaction report.
Customize for;
All Dates
All Accounts - including Hidden
All Categories - including Hidden
All Tags - including Hidden
Payees - Clear All - then scroll through the list and select the similar Payees that you want to "merge", e.g., all variations of Wal Mart.
Select Show Report.

Scan the report results to confirm contents are as desired.
Select all of the report transactions using Click & Shift+Click.
Right Click and select Rename Payee(s).
Enter the desired Payee name and select OK.

If you scan back through the Payee list you should see that the variations have been replaced with the single desired Payee name.

As indicated earlier, this gets tedious - but it accomplishes the goal.
FWIW, QMac allows direst access to the Payee List and thus one works directly in the list - not through a transaction report. One can edit individual entries or select multiple entries and use the Merge command to combine them.
Maybe QWin will someday catch up with QMac in this area :<)

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Tom Young

If you've got variations of a payee's name scattered throughout your Quicken file then the easiest approach is to use the Edit > Find/Replace... tool. You enter enough of the payee's name in the search box to be reasonably certain that you'll pick up all the variations. Quicken will display all "hits" and you can look through the list to determine if any payees should be eliminated from what Quicken's found, then change all the selected names to the one name you want to use. Then run a Reports > Spending > Itemized Payees report to see if your satisfied with the results.

BRETTB

Yes I have been doing that but seems that there could be an easier way or an improvement versus jumping around like 3 different areas. Find, then go to memorize, find and fix, probably have to go to address book too.

Tom Young

Not that I'm aware of. Obviously the Find/Replace method can deal with hundreds of instances. The memorized payees fix should be pretty trivial unless the variations of names scatters the payees all over the alphabet. Likewise for the reminders.

J_Mike