My Memorized Payee List is Blank

FlyerFran

This happened a few weeks ago.  I used the "Validate; while holding CRTLS/Shift press Tools/Memorized Payee List" to fix the problem as described in the Sept 2021 post (now Closed) and it worked great. 

But this time nothing works.  Help Please

Sherlock

I suggest you restore a Quicken file backup saved before the issue appeared.  To locate available backups, you may select File > Find Quicken Files...

FlyerFran

Thanks, tried that but I've got to go too far back.  Hoping we can figure out something else.

FlyerFran

@Sherlock.  Also, even I do go back at find it, then what?  Would like to figure out how it's happened only in the past month or so -- never before?

Sherlock

FlyerFran said:

Thanks, tried that but I've got to go too far back.  Hoping we can figure out something else.

If you haven't already, you may want to review: https://help.quicken.com/display/WIN/Troubleshoot+a+damaged+Quicken+data+file

FlyerFran

Since every backup I opened had the same Missing Payee List issue, I ultimately tried the "Validate; then while holding CRTLS/Shift press Tools/Memorized Payee List" (fix) on my backups and it ended up working on one of my more recent ones.  Obviously, good news, but after several hours of work on this I have some thoughts to share:
  1.  I want to be sure that others know to try the fix on backup files, too.
  2.  The lost Memorized Payee List issue has now recently happened twice to me and based on the                   previous posts, others have had it as well.  So, I for one am voting to get this issue fixed.
  3.  In working the issue I read that one of the causes maybe that our Memorized Payee List is too long.           So, I spent several hours cleaning mine up.  It was painful to accomplish.  Would love to hear of any           shortcuts anyone has discovered to make this task easier, or if it was really necessary in the first                 place.

mshiggins

@FlyerFran how long was your Memorized Payee list? Are you syncing your data to the Quicken cloud?

FlyerFran

@mshiggins - According to the Print Preview it is now 24 pages long.  Before the cleanup, it was over 34 pages long (I stopped while it was still counting).  Yes, I sync to the Q' cloud.

Sherlock

FlyerFran said:

@mshiggins - According to the Print Preview it is now 24 pages long.  Before the cleanup, it was over 34 pages long (I stopped while it was still counting).  Yes, I sync to the Q' cloud.

To determine the number of Memorized Payees, you may press the Ctrl key and select Help > About Quicken

We have 4185 and have not had any problems.

It is possible the cloud account associated with the Quicken file caused the corruption that impacted the Memorized Payee List in the Quicken file.

FlyerFran

@Sherlock.  Thanks for the info, wish I asked before I spent the hours cleaning up the list.  I only now have 888. :-)   I've also turned off syncing.  Since my Q' data is already backed up on OneDrive and I don't really use Q' Mobile or Q' Web I guess I really don't need it.  Correct? 

Sherlock

FlyerFran said:

@Sherlock.  Thanks for the info, wish I asked before I spent the hours cleaning up the list.  I only now have 888. :-)   I've also turned off syncing.  Since my Q' data is already backed up on OneDrive and I don't really use Q' Mobile or Q' Web I guess I really don't need it.  Correct? 

You do not need to enable Sync to the Quicken Cloud unless you use the Quicken Mobile app or Quicken on the Web.  Note: Quicken Cloud is not a backup: https://www.quicken.com/support/what-quicken-cloud

Unfortunately, Quicken will sync some data even if Sync has never been enabled and accounts have never been selected to sync.  I also suggest deleting the cloud account associated with the Quicken file: https://www.quicken.com/support/how-edit-or-delete-your-cloud-datasets-quicken-windows  Note: You will need to use a different Quicken file to delete the appropriate cloud account.

If you do want all the memorized payees back, you know what to do: save a backup (press Ctrl + B) and press Ctrl + Shift and select Tools > Memorized Payee List

Good luck.

mshiggins

Sherlock said:

We have 4185 and have not had any problems.

I find this astonishing. 

Sherlock

mshiggins said:

Sherlock said:

We have 4185 and have not had any problems.

I find this astonishing. 

I agree.  That averages out to about 14 new payees per month over 25 years.  

I know some have claimed that having a large Memorized Payee List degrades performance but we have never found that to be true.  If there is a performance degradation associated with size of the Memorized Payee List, I suspect it may be triggered when the Remove memorized payees not used in last XX months preference is enabled.  (Perhaps the preference may cause Quicken to sequentially scan the list too often.)

mshiggins

I'm fairly certain the Memorized Payee clean up occurs on start up. And it seems like most posters who report a performance improvement after reducing the number of Memorized Payees had not previously had the cleanup preference enabled. 

I did some checking on my data and found the following Payee stats:
- CTRL | About Quicken lists 207 Memorized Payees 
- an Itemized Payee report for 1996 to date filtered for unique Payees had 1472 Payees 

I do wonder why some users see performance issues that correlate to large number of Memorized Payees and some (like you @Sherlock) don't see any performance degradation. 

Sherlock

mshiggins said:

I'm fairly certain the Memorized Payee clean up occurs on start up. And it seems like most posters who report a performance improvement after reducing the number of Memorized Payees had not previously had the cleanup preference enabled. 

I did some checking on my data and found the following Payee stats:
- CTRL | About Quicken lists 207 Memorized Payees 
- an Itemized Payee report for 1996 to date filtered for unique Payees had 1472 Payees 

I do wonder why some users see performance issues that correlate to large number of Memorized Payees and some (like you @Sherlock) don't see any performance degradation. 

Using the Itemized Payee report, we have 3412 unique payees.

Did you actually experience the performance degradation yourself? 

Perhaps you can save a backup, disable the preference, regenerate the Memorized Payee List, and see for yourself whether the size of the list has any measurable impact on performance in the Quicken release you're using. 

Chris_QPW

I personally have 230 memorized payees.  We mostly buy from the same places so they don’t change much.

On the performance question; historically there have been people with thousand (enough to make @Sherlock’s look small) and had no problems.  But when they changed the pop up menus for the payee in the register and somewhat the category one, that is when people started reporting performance problems for entering transactions.

Over the years I think they have fixed that problem, and as such it doesn’t come up any more even though the SuperUsers with long time memorizes of those performance problems still jump on that as a cause of performance problems, even ones not directly related.   At this point I think if there is any connection to performance problems it is more likely due to a corrupted memorized payee list.

Note that I lock all of my memorized payees, and I see that there is a statement that the “clean up x months” that it will not touch locked memorized payees.  So, it is bit useless for me.

On the loss of the memorized payee list.  @Sherlock pointed this out, but I’m going to state it again.  There are various things in Quicken that are synced to Mobile/Web.  This list is one of them.  Budgets is another.  I notice that both of these are “subject to be deleted”.

One can recover the memorized payees if you have an old data file that has them in it.

From the old data file:
File -> File Export -> QIF File …-> select only the Memorized payee, and then OK.

From the current data file:
File -> File Import -> QIF File …-> Browse to the QIF file you created, and select only Memorized payee -> OK.

Chris_QPW

Warning.  I just tested the importing of the exporting of the memorized payees only and it seems that Quicken isn’t honoring the setting.  It exported both the securities and the account names.  And when I imported the file it ignored the fact that I only selected memorized payee and imported both the securities and accounts into a new data file.

For this use case where you are recovering the memorized payees from basically the same data file, this shouldn’t matter, but it is warning for the general use of this export/import.