category suggestions reverting to single use designations rather than ones used 99% of the time

deliusfan

My mind melts every time it wants to make Whole Foods a "business per diem" or USPS a "business travel" (because I got a passport photo there five years ago). And that actually just started this week! It was correctly popping up as "shipping and postage until then.

My quicken base file is from 1998. I'm sure a zillion updates later that there are things hanging on that are relentless. Can I literally delete every single suggested category and start over? This would be easier and so much less infuriating.

I HAVE tried going to changing the memorized transaction list, but unless [on a downloaded transaction I'm entering] I go and retype Whole Foods, that stupid per diem is trying to input itself. Only when I clear and retype the name does it fix itself. Equally infuriating.

So what's my nuclear option?

UKR

Has your Memorized Payee List grown too big over time?

How many Memorized Payee List entries do you have in your file? A couple hundred? Several thousands?
Click Help in the Menu Bar. CTRL+click About Quicken and it'll tell you in a File Information window.

To trim the list and keep it in shape please do this:
In Edit / Preferences / Data Entry and Quickfill make sure you have a checkmark at
[√] "Remove memorized payees not used in [xx] months"
and set [xx] to something like "18". Do not set it to zero.
IMHO, you should set the number to 12 or higher for best results, so that once-a-year payees don't vanish.
Restart Quicken for the change to take effect and housekeeping to clean up the Memorized Payee List.
Check the File Information box again to see the reduced count.

If you have multiple MPL entries for the same payee, delete the unused or unwanted ones.
You can set the "Lock" option on MPL entries that are properly categorized. This will prevent a new transaction from changing the MPL entry to something unwanted .
If you regularly need multiple MPL entries for the same payee, but different categorizations, use distinct Payee Names, e.g., Costco Wholesale, Costco Gas Station, etc.

deliusfan

I was REALLY hoping that was the solution; it's actually been preset and holding at "remove after 4 months". However that doesn't seem to be the case! Maybe this was a feature added later, and so really old categories I made were immune to this in the code?

Since this isn't the issue (after all), what do you think my next step should be? Should I try killing the entire list one by one and then doing a file validate and restart? Is there a step before this?

UKR

This might be worth a try …

Rebuild MPL

After creating a backup of your Quicken data file …
To rebuild the Memorized Payee List from existing transactions, click Tools, hold down Shift and CTRL, then click Memorized Payee List.

deliusfan

I did try that just now, but what Quicken defined as "recently used" was just whack. According to the table when I organized by date, it showed about 20 dry cleaners that I last used all on January 7 of this year. That's a lot of dry cleaning. That was the final straw. I control clicked and deleted the lot of them.

So now that I'm at zero (I think) how do I carefully allow these to repopulate themselves? I did a few transactions but the list is still empty.