How can I find information regarding clearing memorized payees in Quicken Mac?

Question

While in the Quicken for Mac section, I enter in the search term clear memorized payees and ALL information points to Quicken for Windows and decriptions of how to edit/clear the list ALL BEGIN with find the xxxx Menu which does not exist in the Mac version. Help from within the QUicken Mac program does not help either. I really need to clear the list and start over, before I download my next set of transactions from the bank.

CraigM-Tucson · Answer

Thanks - I believe this will help.

jacobs · Answer

@CraigM-Tucson  There is no such thing in Quicken Mac as a "memorized Payee." Or perhaps more accurately, every Payee used in a transaction is memorized. Allow me to dig into this a little further, because I'm confused about what you're trying to accomplish…

There's no need to do all that scrolling if you know which Payees they are. When you go to Window > Payees & Rules, in each of the three tabs (Payees, Renaming Rules, QuickFill Rules) you can search for Payees by name in the upper right. So you can find a Payee in a second, without scrolling.

Hiding a Payee will make it not show up as a suggested choice if you're entering a transaction in the Payee field. For example, if you have an old Payee called "Home Door Store", and you don't want to see it every time you start to enter a transaction for "Home Depot", hiding "Home Door Store" will make it not show up in the list.

But that has nothing to do with downloading transactions, which you also mention. Downloaded transaction use the Payee name given by the financial institution, a Payee name derived from a local Renaming Rule you've created, or sometime, a server-based Renaming Rule Quicken applies. Renaming Rules help you create a consistent or preferred Payee name in Quicken when your financial institution doesn't download something as clean as you'd like. For example, if every transaction for Home Depot on a credit card comes in with a different Payee name like "Home Depot Store 12345 Anytown", you can create a Renaming Rule to say if the Statement Name (what the bank downloads) contains "Home Depot" to make the Payee name for the transaction "Home Depot".

You can't Hide Renaming Rules; you can only delete them if you don't want them.

QuickFill Rules have nothing to do with Payee names, but with Categories and possibly other fields in a transaction. QuickFill rules allow you to direct Quicken to apply a specified Category (and, optionally, other fields like Amount, Memo, Tag, splits) any time a transaction is created for a specific Payee name.

Renaming Rules and QuickFill Rules can work together. So you can clean up a downloaded Payee name to what you want it to be (e.g. Home Depot) and then have a QuickFill Rule which directs Quicken to assign a category of your choosing to every new Home Depot transaction.

You can't Hide QuickFill Rules; you can only delete them if you don't want them.

Should you want to delete a mass of rules, or all the rules, you wouldn't have to click on each one. Click on the first, scroll to the last, shift-click to select them all, and press Delete.

I don't believe there is a way to mass-hide Payees; you'd need to hide the ones you don't want to see one at a time.

You can't delete the Payees, because the Payees you see in the window are the same entries in the database for all your transactions. If Quicken allowed you to delete all the Payees, your entire database would be transactions with Unknown Payee!

Hopefully at least some of this will help sort out some of the confusion I sensed in the earlier posts. If you post back to clarify what you're wanting to purge from your data, we can dig into it further if any of this isn't clear.

CraigM-Tucson · Answer

Thanks, it 'kind-of' helps. I really have only a few to maybe a half dozen of the quickfill rules or payee rules that I want it to forget, but the thought of scrolling endlessly through 1,836 payees to find 6 to Hide seems tedious, so perhaps I could check forget on ALL 1836 at once to forget them all? If I have to click Hide on each of 1,836 that too is more tedious. It would seem beneficial if this were something like preferences choice, or even if I could delete the Qicken preferences file buried deep in the Library?