Memorized Payee automatically marking new manual transactions as cleared

Question

Why do memorized payees have new, manual, transactions automatically set as cleared?  This is asinine.  Just because a previous transaction was cleared (or reconciled) doesn't mean every future transaction will be.  And yes you can change this in the Memorized Payee List, but you have to do it  for not just every Payee but every category and subcategory for that Payee.  How much time do you think your users have?

Coming over to Quicken for Windows from Quick for Mac seems like such a downgrade, I'm really considering cancelling my subscription.  Especially trying to use this support system.  Searching for a topic, you can't even filter down to the platform you are using, just dates.  And you can't even add Tags for things within the program itself, like "Cleared", the name of a field in the register.  It is almost like Quicken wants people to leave.

Quicken for Windows version R59.18 (though it doesn't matter since I've found articles about this going back years)

Jeremy Krall · Answer

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20462016#Comment_20462016

Thanks UKR for the thoughtful writeup.  I know that the programmers are the ones that need to answer why this is the way it is, which is why I came to a Quicken site to ask the question.

I really like the idea of having Quicken automatically clean out the MPL.  I went into the setting you listed (thank you so much for the path!) and by default it was already set to remove payees not used in 14 months.  I'm guessing they also liked your idea of going above 12 months for the yearly items. 😀

As for how may entries are in my MPL, with all the categories and subcategories, yes it is a lot.  Not wanting to take the time to manually count them I "printed" them to a CSV file and looked at them as a spreadsheet.  Keeping the default 14 month selection, there are 229 items on the list.  Thus why I really don't want to manually go through them to clean up this crazy item.  Especially coming from Quicken on Mac that didn't have this issue.

UKR · Answer

But why? Why does Quicken do this?

It has been this way ever since I started using Quicken many years ago. Only the programmers who originally coded this feature could give you an answer.

I've always wondered about this myself and just can't figure out a reason why I would want a new transaction to already be marked as cleared.

hundreds of entries in the MPL to uncheck each one individually

Do you really have hundreds of MPL entries used regularly to make payments or receive deposits from?

For me it's only a couple of dozen. A lot of my regularly recurring transaction activity is covered by scheduled reminders and doesn't need MPL entries.

That "cleared" flag is only set if you create the MPL entry from an older transaction which is already marked cleared or reconciled. It isn't set if you memorize a recent uncleared, unreconciled transaction.

Perhaps cleaning your MPL of entries not used in over 12 months might be a first step in maintaining your MPL. (See 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 "12" (or longer). 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.

Jeremy Krall · Answer

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20461921#Comment_20461921

But why?  Why does Quicken do this?  Just because one transaction is cleared does not mean that the next from the same payee/cat/subcategory is going to be.  In fact, it's more than likely that when you are entering in a transaction initially it will NOT be cleared, despite the transaction from a month ago being so.  This setting makes absolutely no sense.  And to say that I have to go through hundreds of entries in the MPL to uncheck each one individually is beyond insane.