Payees not showing in select list for customizing report

rthompson

I need a report that shows transactions for 10 selected payees. The checkbox list in the customize window of the payee tab of the customize window does not show all them. the note says there may be too many payees, and there were. so I ruthlessly consolidated payees, using simple names, perhaps 500 total. but the checkbox list still is incomplete. is there a way to sanitize the payee file? thanks

Jim_Harman

Are these all payees you have used recently? According to the Help, the list defaults to payees you have used in the past 3 years, and you may have to increase the report's date range first if a payee you want does not appear in the list.

Also the list is not your Memorized payee list, it is all payees in all your registers.

Apparently there is some limit to the number of payees that can appear in the list, You might want to review the information here.
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7851834/customizing-reports-by-payee#latest 

Quicken Diana

rthompson

Thank you for reaching out in the Community though I am sorry that you are experiencing this issue with the payees on the report. I’d like to ask a couple of questions to better assist you. First, what version of Quicken are you using? You can find this information by clicking on the HELP menu and choosing the option ABOUT QUICKEN. The version will be displayed here.

Second, which report have you selected? This will help me to know if there is an option within the customize options window to choose the date range for which the report will look for the selected payees.

Third, are these expense or income payees/ transactions? Are they online payees that are set up in Bill Manager? Are they Memorized payees?

Please let me know and I’ll be able to look further into assisting with this issue.

Thank you

-          Quicken Diana

rthompson

Premier 2020, R26.21 (27.1.26.21)
I have some screenshots of the report customization tabs, how can I send them to you?
I am trying to generate an expense spending report by specifying specific payees. They are not necessarily online or memorized payees. Thanks for your help

Jim_Harman

One way to work around this apparent limitation in Quicken would be to assign a specific Tag to the transactions with the payees you want to include in the report, then filter the report by that tag.

rthompson

Even though I cleaned up the payee proliferation by consolidating similar names, Quicken appears not to refresh its total payee count and still thinks there are too many to hand-select in the payee tab. I have tried verification, archiving, etc. Any thoughts? Thanks, rst

Jim_Harman

About how many Payees do you currently have?

Go to the Itemized Payees report and select Include all dates. Click on Collapse All, then expand the Income and Expense sections so you get just the payee names and not the detailed records. Adjust the height of the window so you have some round number of payees 

Are the payees in question listed? If not you have a different issue to investigate.

Count how many screenfuls of payees you have.

I chose 25 transactions per screen and I have 108 screens full, so about 2700 payees.

I did not test thoroughly, but if I choose Current Year for the report's date range, the selection list does not include payees that were only used many years ago. If I set the date range to say 2010, it does include payees that were only used then, so the Help text appears to be correct.

rthompson

roughly 2000

Jim_Harman

OK, and when you set up the report as I describe above, do you see the payees you are looking for?

And if you narrow down the date range so it includes one or more transactions for one of the missing payees, do you see the missing payee in the selection list?

rthompson

thanks for the help. no, I never see the payees I am looking for in the selection panel, no matter what date range I select; all-time or very recently. the payees that do show are older and the non-showing payees are newer, which suggests that quicken is keeping an internal list of all payees ever. thanks again. rst

Jim_Harman

And you have consolidated actual payees in your registers (not the Memorized Payee list) to around 2000?

If so, are there payees that are no longer in any of your registers but still appear in the selection list?

Have you performed a Validate and Repair on your data file? That might help. File > Vile Operations > Validate and Repair, select the Validate option.

Jim_Harman

Also do you have a rough idea of how many different payees you had in your registers before consolidating?

rthompson

if it is now 2,000, I must have consolidated out another 2-3,000 (variations on the name, store codes, prefixes, etc) so 4-5,000 total before. thanks, rst

leoh

I was not finding all my Payees in the Customize Report. Very frustrating. I tinkered around and came up with something that works for me. First, I found ALL transaction by searching for "?" without the quotes. Once I had the list, I changed all occurences of anything in the Tag field to a blank. I went back, built an Itemized Payee report, under Spending in the Report section, and then clicked Customize. I selected the Payee tab and all Payees were then present. I can only assume the data became corrupted somehow and by performing the change in Tag, the list was rebuilt. Good luck.

rthompson

Great idea to force the rebuild of the payee data structure . I use the tags heavily and they are more important to me than the payee selection problem. I will experiment some but i would like to hear from quicken on this. Thanks