Where are my Payees?

Question

Just imported a QXF file from Mac onto Windows Quicken and everything is working well, with the exception that my payee list is gone, despite all transactions are recorded correctly, with the right payees and associated categories. The categories are all there but now on windows it seems the pay list doesn't exist anymore but rather a "memorized payee" list which of course... it is empty! Is there a way I can rebuild the "memorized payee" list in windows based on all the transactions which have been imported, where all the payees are right there!?

Chris_QPW · Answer

We might need a Mac expert to fully answer your questions, but I will take a shot at it based on what I have heard about Quicken Mac.

When Quicken Mac was created they decided that payees would be stored in the database as a list and linked to transactions.  This has the effect that if one was to change a payee then it will change in all the transactions.

Quicken Windows doesn't work like that.  There isn't a payee list that connects the payees.  A payee on a transaction is just a field in that transaction.  Changing it doesn't affect any other transaction.

If a Quicken Windows user wants to change the payee for some transactions, they would use find and replace.

There is a payee list under: Tools -> Address Book
But this list is for writing checks and such and is mostly used for the business features of the Home & Business & Rental edition of Quicken.

There is also a payee list for online bills.

And then there is the Memorized Payee list.  The equivalent of this in Quicken Mac is the QuickFill list.  And no it doesn't get transferred (another limitation of the QXF export/import) and no there isn't going to be a way to automatically create it.  You will just have to either enter it yourself, or build it up over time.

Note the flow is:

Renaming Rules change the downloaded payee (usually normalizing it like "Safeway ###" to "Safeway"), which then feeds into the Memorized Payee list.  A match of the exact payee (ignoring case) and Quicken will use the category and memo in that item to fill in the transaction.

Note that the main reason it is called a Memorized Payee is because the first purpose it was used for and is still used for is that if you are entering a transaction manually and start typing the payee name it will look it up in this list and fill out the rest of the transaction based on it (you can also get the list from the pull down menu in the payee field.

Note there are various settings in Quicken Windows for controlling creating the renaming rules and memorized payees automatically (or not) and using them.

Rich_M · Answer

@g.cerqueira If you haven't changed any settings then Automatically memorize new payees should be checked in Data entry and QuickFill settings.

If that's correct then I think the problem is that Quicken doesn't memorize imported transactions, only the ones you manually enter.

You can build your MPL by selecting each transaction and pressing Ctrl+M to memorize them, I don't know how many transactions you have, so that may be time consuming for you.

g.cerqueira · Answer

Yes, new installation, new device, windows 10 latest version, quicken deluxe cloud subscription.