What happens when I delete a payee? (Q Mac)

Stewart Dale Spencer

I wanted to get rid of some payees that pop up when I'm entering certain transactions. I went to "Payees & Rules," selected one, and hit the minus symbol at the bottom of the window. In the background, I noticed that the overview showing spending by category updated. That made me think that perhaps it actually deleted the transactions with those payees instead of just deleting that payee name for future use.

I think I should have gone to "QuickFill Rules" instead. I am concerned that it's going to throw balances off on some of my accounts. I did not get any kind of warning asking me if I really intended to delete those reconciled transactions. Does anyone know what happens when you delete a payee?

jacobs

When you delete a Payee in the Payees & Rules window, it doesn't actually delete the Payee! It marks it as Hidden, so it disappears from the list here and in dropdown menus — but the Payee is still in your database, and the transaction(s) which use this Payee are unaffected.

To see this, in the Payees & Rules window, click the checkbox near the top to Show Hidden. The right-most column should be hidden, and you show see this Payee in the list, with a checkbox in that column.

This is what most people want when they think to delete a Payee: to get it out of sight going forward, without adversely affecting the past. But what if you really, really want to make a Payee gone forever? There are a few things you can do. One is to merge this Payee with one or more other Payees. If you're planning to do cleanup and delete multiple Payees, you could create a Payee called something like "*Deleted Payee*", and merge the Payees you don't want not this Payee. All the transactions using the original Payee name will be changed to "*Deleted Payee*". Or you can edit one of the transactions using the Payee name you don't want, edit it to something else, and Quicken will ask you if you want to rename all existing transactions using that Payee to the new name.