What is a "favorite" online payee?

Rocket J Squirrel

The Online Payee List has a column "Favorite" and there is a "Favorite" button at the bottom.

What purpose does this serve?

jrich75

On the Bills tab, there is an option to display "Billpay Favorites".  I suspect it has something to do with that.  I know when I was trying to make sense of the tab behavior I marked a few billers as favorites and the display is now filtered to just those payees when the option is selected.  Other than that, I have no idea.

NotACPA

To flag how many times you've gone to the doughnut store???

Boatnmaniac

@Rocket J Squirrel - You are a persistent one.  I see you asked this same question back in 2018 and didn't get an answer then. 

As far as I'm concerned a Favorite payee is one that pays me instead of me paying them.  I just wish I had one like that. 

Seriously, I didn't see anything about this in Quicken Help, nor in a quick search of Community and in Support. 

I was guessing that this might be a place to indicate which is your favorite one if you have more than one option for the same payee.  But I could not find a way to edit a payee for that.  I also noticed in my entire payee list, that "Favorite" column is totally blank.  So, I'm dumbfounded.

Rocket J Squirrel

Boatnmaniac said:

@Rocket J Squirrel - You are a persistent one.  I see you asked this same question back in 2018 and didn't get an answer then. 

And, @Boatnmaniac , you have a better memory than I do.

I actually have a serious reason to ask. When I pay a credit card online through my bank as the last step of reconciling the card account, Quicken often populates the wrong payee in the Write Checks screen.

By "wrong payee", I mean sometimes Q chooses an older version of a payee, e.g., "Citi Cards{Foo}" instead of "Citi Cards{Bar}", where the former no longer exists on any list visible to me anywhere in Quicken. It is easy to miss when Quicken screws this up because of the similarity of the 2 payee names. And other times, Q will populate the payee with the account name instead of the payee name. At least that's easier to notice.

I was secretly hoping a Favorite payee might take precedence and get me out of this annoying situation. I guess the only thing to do is try it and see whether it has any effect. As far as I can tell so far, it does absolutely nothing. You can't even click on the Favorite header to sort the favorites to the top.

jrich75

On the Bills tab, there is an option to display "Billpay Favorites".  I suspect it has something to do with that.  I know when I was trying to make sense of the tab behavior I marked a few billers as favorites and the display is now filtered to just those payees when the option is selected.  Other than that, I have no idea.

Rocket J Squirrel

By George, @jrfaris , I think you've got it! I never use the Bills tab, so I never noticed that option. At least there is some functionality associated with favorite billers, albeit trivially minor. Thanks for pointing this out.

Boatnmaniac

I don't see that option on my Bills tab.  But I also don't have any Online Billers so maybe that is the reason why I don't see it.

Rocket J Squirrel

Here it is. I don't have any online billers either, just online payees.

Boatnmaniac

Ah, I got it figured out now...about how to assign and see Favorites, that is.  I'm still a bit cloudy on what the functionality of Favorites really does (if anything) other than to filter the list as noted by @jrfaris .  Something to try to dig into further when I get the time, I guess.