How can i speed up search in the Quicken Payees & Rules window? (Q Mac)

gojohn

It's painfully slow for me to find a payee in the Payees & Rules window. Quicken literally pauses for 5 seconds after I type each character into the search box. I only have ~5200 payees and ~32000 transactions. How can I get it to speed up and/or is it a bug that Quicken needs to fix?

jacobs

I have  similar size database, and I'm not experiencing slowness to the degree you are. It takes about one second per character in the search box -- a bit annoying, but not crazy slow.

What model Mac are you running? Does it have a spinning hard drive or a solid state drive? Between my various Macs, I can see a significant performance improvement on the fastest Mac.

There are undoubtedly things they could do to improve the indexing/searching of Payees in the Payees window. You'll notice that if you enter a transaction, there is not a similar delay as you type a Payee name and it populates the dropdown list -- for me, that is pretty instantaneous.

I'm just guessing that the developers do most of their work on test databases which aren't as large as ours, and they're probably working on the latest, fastest Macs -- so they don't regularly experience a performance issue like this.

The only thing I can suggest is for you to create a new post in the Product Ideas section of this forum requesting that they optimize or otherwise speed up the search speed; these Idea threads can be voted on by other users, and those which attract more votes get brought to the attention of the developers. If you post it, I'll vote for it!

P.S. I would also include the speed of the Search box in the register window; those searches take longer and I use them ore often, so for me, that's a bigger annoyance than the search box in the Payees window.

UKR

gojohn said:

It's painfully slow for me to find a payee in the Payees & Rules window. Quicken literally pauses for 5 seconds after I type each character into the search box. I only have ~5200 payees and ~32000 transactions. How can I get it to speed up and/or is it a bug that Quicken needs to fix?

May I ask why you have so many payees? Are you running a busy mail order business with 5200 individual customers?
Or do you have many variations of the same Payee Name, e.g.,

• POS TRANS 070119 STARBU
• POS TRANS 070219 STARBU
• POS TRANS 070319 STARBU

one each for every day that you go to Starbucks for a cup of coffee?
In that case I recommend merging Payee Names to standardize on a single Payee Name, e.g., "Starbucks" for all existing transactions, to reduce the overall size of the Payee list.
For new transactions set up Renaming Rules to create new transactions with the standardized Payee Name as you download transactions.

jacobs

@UKR  To answer your question with my own usage: I have 4,652 Payees in my Quicken data, which dates back nearly three decades. I have never downloaded transactions, so I don't have variations of downloaded Payee names. I don't run a mail order business and don't have customers. I did use a credit card for work expenses for many years, so that accounts for some of the volume of Payees. But travel and entertainment and eating out create a lot of Payees over time. Bottom line: I don't think having 4-5,000 Payees is anything particularly unusual or problematic.

gojohn

I have twenty years worth of data and most of my payees have been real payees. Actually I often combined ones that aren't the same. For instance, I combine gas stations rather than listing the specific one I visit. I have a few cases where I haven't renamed the downloaded names, but you might guess it's a bit of a pain to rename them if my Payees window doesn't respond well to searches.

Auto-complete in the register is super-fast—no delays at all.

This issue with the Payees window feels like a bug. I'm using the most recent MacBook Pro with lots of RAM and SSD. There's no excuse I can think of for it to take so long to search this data. My guess is that it's searching the raw data rather than looking at the small (from a computer standpoint) list of 5200 payees. It should literally take a couple of milliseconds to search 5200 strings.

Quicken_Tyka

Hello @gojohn

Thank you for taking the time to visit the Community to report this issue, although I apologize that you haven't received a follow-up response.

First, can you verify where the data file is stored? his can be located by holding the "Command” key on the keyboard and clicking the file name along the top in Quicken. Do you see any mention of Dropbox or iCloud?

If the active file is stored in a cloud drive, this can cause the behavior that you have described.

Please let us know what you find!

-Quicken Tyka

Blastphemy

I'm with you, @gojohn – I have a the fastest Mac laptop that was available in 2020, fully-loaded with all upgrades in RAM, processor speed, SSD drive, etc. Almost every program on my Mac runs at lightning speed. There are only two exceptions: Microsoft Office and QMac2021. What's even more frustrating is that QMac2007 running virtualized in Mojave using Parallels is FASTER than QMac2021 running natively in Big Sur!

My QMac2007 database is exactly the same as my QMac2021 database, and it's beyond disappointing how much slower QMac2021 is compared to the 14-year-old QMac2007. Something is wrong with QMac2021's optimization, because nothing should run as slowly as it does on my Mac. It's even slower than the bloated Microsoft Office, and that's saying a lot.

gojohn

Hi @Quicken_Tyka, my file was in Dropbox. To test your hypothesis, I copied the file to a location that neither Dropbox nor iCloud control and I still had the same issue.

jacobs

@Blastphemy  It's really odd, because I find, and it seems most users find, that Quicken Mac is faster than ever, especially with a recent vintage Mac and a SSD drive.

A few common things to check, which I suspect you have already done:

• Make sure you don't have one or multiple report windows open behind the main Quicken window. Having reports open which need to update with every transaction can slow Quicken considerably (although it shouldn't impact Search in the Payees window as @gojohn is reporting).
• As Tyka posted above, make sure your live Quicken data file is on your hard drive (internal or attached external), as putting the file in the cloud can cause slowness and other unexplained issues.

There have been a few other scattered reports of Quicken Mac 6.x running very slowly, but the original posters never wrote back after it was suggested they check these possible causes, so we don't know if they are still experiencing the problems. It seems that this isn't a widespread problem, so there has to be some specific set of circumstances causing the slowness with your file.

Assuming neither of the above apply to you, I'll make a suggestion for a possible cheat to get this issue to the attention of the Quicken folks. Since they just started a staged release of version 6.2, the thread in which Marcus announced the release is one he will be reading over the next few days for reports of any problems with 6.2. It's a short-term window where you have a possibility to get this issue in front of the product manager himself. Post in that thread, to Marcus, explaining that you have had a problem with Quicken running very sluggishly on a fast, modern Mac, and you hoped it would get better with the next release, but 6.2 is as slow as 6.1 before it. (That at least makes it relevant to the new release. ) With luck, he'll read your post and get in touch with you to gather logs or have one of the engineers look into it.

Blastphemy

I've already tried everything you suggested. The program is just slow. I don't have my data file in the cloud or on an external drive. I typically don't have multiple windows open. I have the same 15 years of financial information in v6.2 beta as I do in QMac2007, and yet QMac2007 is faster.

I'm not saying that v6.2 beta is running "very slowly"; rather, it's running slower than I would expect on a modern machine with upgraded specifications. The fact that v6.11 and v6.2 beta can take up to 8 seconds to load initially isn't going end the world, but it's a sharp contrast to much more resource-intensive programs like Photoshop, Acrobat, and Excel (if a huge spreadsheet) that open in less than two seconds on my Mac (if not instantly).

QMac2021 just feels sluggish, whereas almost every other program on my Mac doesn't. It would be nice if whatever is causing QMac2021 to feel sluggish would be optimized for a better user experience, but perhaps the programmers just aren't up to it? I dunno. Makes no sense to me.

jacobs

Quicken 6.2 launches and opens my data file in about 4-7 seconds. That's on a 2019 iMac running Mojave with a fusion drive. (It's faster if it's just recently been quit, when perhaps some of the code is still on the SSD part of the drive.) Maybe I consider that acceptable because the early years of modern Quicken Mac, until they optimized something in 2018, would take 40-50 seconds to launch and open!

Quicken has to read and process large parts of the database because it has many balances which are calculated on the fly, not stored (with is good, because stored values could inevitably get out of sync and require database maintenance), so people with a large database of decades of transactions will be a few seconds slower than someone with relatively few transactions. 

I've never had an Adobe application open in two seconds! I find the Adobe apps very slow to load; perhaps performance would be much faster with the latest apps on an M1 Mac with an SSD, but on my not-very-old Mac with older versions of the Adobe apps, it takes Adobe Acrobat about 5 seconds to load and Photoshop about 12 seconds. FileMaker Pro is my second-slowest performer: about 20 seconds to open. Adobe InDesign takes a mind-numbing 45 seconds to open.

But I'd note that launch speed is not the issue that this post was originally about, which was extreme sluggishness typing characters in the Payees window -- and something I don't experience at all.

For me, the only part of Quicken that is annoyingly slow is Search. Since I find a first search always takes longer than subsequent searches, I infer that some indexing is done as it searches, and if so, I wish the developers could run whatever indexing routine as a background thread after launching, so that when a user gets around to doing a Search, the search could execute more quickly.

gojohn

Yeah, I find that search is pretty slow, too, but I'm guessing that's because it's searching all the fields of all the entries. While they could do some work to index everything so that it's more easily searchable (similar to how things like Spotlight or Lucene do it) it's acceptable enough and more important to work on other features for finance. I typically set my views to "Last 12 months" which makes the searches relatively fast. It's only when I do all entries that it seems to be slow.

You're right about how fast the app loads. I generally find everything works well enough, with the exception of the Payees & Rules window.