Unused/Obsolete Payees In Itemized Payee List

bernardch

This occurs both when generating either a "Itemized Payee Report" or "Spending by Payee Report", when trying customizing the report to select specific Payees, the payee list shows dozens of obsolete or unused payees - some of which have not been used for years. These are NOT payees in the memorized transaction list, nor in the address book. Nor are these payees in the online payees list as I do not use any Quicken online services other than downloading stock/fund quotes. None of these obsolete.unused payees are in any transaction in my current quicken file.

An example of two of the obsolete Payees - one is for a check I wrote at a business approximately 3 years ago and and another is a payee in a single credit card entry from 2018. With all these obsolete payees it is difficult to sort through and tag the specific payees I need for my custom report.

How do I delete these unused/obsolete payees?

Jim_Harman

For more information on this topic, please see this discussion which I think is still accurate even though the Help text has changed.
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20006951

UKR

For as long as you have a transaction in your data file mentioning a certain Payee, it will remain available in the various selection lists.

The Itemized Payee Report, by default only shows payees where a transaction falls within the selected Date Range. That means, do you need to include transactions from 2018 in your report or can you change it to a shorter Date Range? If the transaction falls outside the selected Date Range, the Payee Name won't show.

Don't even think about deleting transactions. That would mess up your history and your Running Balance.
If you have multiple variations of the same Payee, spelled differently (McDonalds, Mc Donalds, MacDonalds, etc.) you can Edit / Find/Replace Payee Names and change to use only one variant of the name.

Jim_Harman

For more information on this topic, please see this discussion which I think is still accurate even though the Help text has changed.
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20006951