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Managing Payee lists (in Q Mac)

acs2

I'm new to MAC Quicken but have years of experience using Windows Quicken. I'm helping my wife convert to MAC Quicken.

Is there a way to bulk delete Payees that are old? If I recall correctly there's an option in Windows Quicken to automatically delete payees that have not been used in a year.

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Jon

Quicken Mac won't let you delete a Payee that's being used by a transaction, you can only delete Payees that are unused. The best you could do would be to mark those Payees as Hidden, but there's no way to do that based on how long it's been since they were last used; I don't think Quicken Mac shows you that anywhere.

acs2

Yes, I should have stated Hidden rather than Delete as i knew that.

I would make use of a feature which allows one to filter on date last used and then Hide multiple Payees in bulk. It would be similar to the find/replace feature in Windows quicken with the added options to select last used before date and an action of Hide.

jacobs

To add to what @Jon wrote… The reason you can't delete Payees in use for older transactions is that there is not a separate list of memorized transactions independent of the Payee list. Everything is tied together in the database; if you edit the name/spelling of a Payee in your Payee list, that will be visible on any transactions which every used that Payee. So if it allowed you to delete a payee, any transactions which had used that Payee would be left with no Payee — not a good situation to allow. So, as @Jon wrote, you can instead Hide Payees, so they won't show up in drop-down menus of possible Payee names, but your old transactions using hidden Payees will not be affected. And it doesn't make the database inefficient to have thousands of Payees.

Another option if you're doing a big cleanup of your database is that you can Merge one or more Payees together. So if you find similar Payee names due to spelling or slightly different entry, you can merge them into one. If you want to clean up more significantly, you could create a Payee called "Deleted Payee" or something like that, and then merge as many old Payees as you want into that one. But I think it's better practice to just Hide the ones you think you no longer need.

Unfortunately, there is no way to select a bunch of Payees together and Hide them with one command; you have to Hide each Payee individually. That's an annoyance if you're doing a big cleanup as you are engaged in, but I'm sure it was designed that way to prevent users from accidentally hiding a lot of Payees at once without meaning to.

And as @Jon said, there is no way to see the Date Last Used for each Payee. But there is a column for Uses, which can be helpful for identifying Payees which were only used once or a handful of times that you might want to hide. (You can sort the Payee list by number of uses by clicking in the Uses column heading; click on the Name column heading when you want to re-sort them alphabetically.)

If you have a large job of weeding old Payees, my suggestion is to tackle it in chunks over several sessions, rather than feeling overwhelmed by a list of several thousand Payees. Do A to B today, C-F tomorrow, G-K next week, and so on so it's not as daunting a task. The good thin is that once you do this clean-up once, it's not something you need to repeat with any regularity.

Jon

There is one way to see when a payee was last used. Go to the All Transactions register and search on the payee name. If necessary, you can disable all the columns except Date and Payee to eliminate search results that are matching on something other than the payee name. But you'd have to search on each payee name individually which would be rather cumbersome if you wanted to go through the whole list of unhidden payees.

RickO

You actually can bulk mark payees as hidden. If you select multiple payees in the Payees window (using Command-click or Shift-click), you can then right-click (or control-click) one of the selected payees to bring up a contextual menu in which "Hide Payees" is an option.

If you sort the list by Uses, with lowest number of uses first, those single use payees are the ones you're most likely wanting to hide. (Zero-use payees, like payees whose only transaction you deleted, don't appear in the list.) Then you can use Command-click to select them and Control-click to hide them. But at that point, it's probably just as easy to tick the Hidden checkbox. Power hint: you can slide the Uses and Hidden columns to the left of the Payee name column to make the process easier.

But do you really need to hide payees? As jacobs says, having thousands of payees, hidden or not, doesn't affect the performance of the modern QMac database. In my database, I have 3000 payees. More than half of them are single-use. Only about 150 of them are hidden. I find it necessary to hide a rarely used payee name only when it's first few characters match those of a more often used payee, causing me to have to type more characters when entering the name. Otherwise I find there's no need to hide payees.

In case you're not aware, when entering a payee, rather than scrolling through the list, type two or three characters of the payee name. This will narrow the list down to a very small number, often just one, of payee names.

jacobs

You actually can bulk mark payees as hidden. If you select multiple payees in the Payees window (using Command-click or Shift-click), you can then right-click (or control-click) one of the selected payees to bring up a contextual menu in which "Hide Payees" is an option.

Thanks, @RickO, for this, which I had forgotten. I've corrected my post above.

Jon

Zero-use payees do show up in the list, they have "unused" in the Uses column. When sorted by that column they will be at the top of the list. I just checked and have one that looks like it came in a downloaded transaction. I occasionally will go in & delete the ones I can, but there are always at least a couple unused hardwired categories I can't get rid of.

RickO

Yes, I see that now. I tried to create an unused payee by creating a transaction with a new payee and then deleting the transaction. The payee disappeared from the list when the transaction was deleted. However, if you create a new payee directly in the Payee window, then it does appear as unused.

acs2

I'll give these ideas a try

Thanks everyone