Root cause found for thousands of "unused" payees - duplicate records created on download (Q Mac)

mybank2002

Hi Quicken Mac community,

I've been investigating why I have thousands of payees marked "unused" in my Payees list and I've found a reproducible pattern I'd like confirmed before doing a bulk cleanup.

What I found:

Searching for a specific payee name AMAZON PRIME*BN0XE8FT3 returns two identical payee records with the exact same name. One has Uses = 1 (linked to a transaction). The other is marked unused with zero uses and no rules attached. Same name, two separate records.

My theory:

When Quicken downloads a transaction, it sometimes creates a payee record for the raw bank name before any processing happens, then creates or points to a second record after renaming or matching logic runs. The transaction ends up linked to the second record, leaving the first as an orphan with zero uses and nothing pointing to it.

What I ruled out:

This is not caused by deleted transactions. I ran a controlled test where I manually created a transaction with a completely unique payee name I had never used before. It appeared in the Payees list with Uses = 1. When I tried to delete the payee while the transaction still existed, Quicken correctly refused and offered to hide it instead. When I then deleted the transaction, the payee disappeared from the list automatically. So deleted transactions clean up after themselves. These orphaned duplicates are something different and are not getting cleaned up automatically.

My current situation:

I have over 3,000 payees marked unused out of 12,539 total. The vast majority appear to be raw bank download names that got orphaned when Quicken's renaming or matching logic redirected the transaction to a different record. A bulk delete of unused records would significantly clean up my file.

My questions:

1. Is this a known behavior where the download process creates a duplicate payee record that never gets cleaned up?
2. Is it safe to bulk select and delete all payees marked "unused," given that by definition no transaction points to them?
3. Is there any risk I'm not seeing to deleting unused payees in bulk, such as scheduled transactions, budgets, or reports that might reference them in a way that doesn't increment the Uses count?

Research I did before posting:

Official documentation I reviewed:

• https://info.quicken.com/mac/managing-payees
• https://info.quicken.com/mac/how-quicken-suggests-payee-names-for-downloaded-tr
• https://info.quicken.com/mac/hidden-accounts-after-update

Community threads I reviewed:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7968766/managing-payee-lists-in-q-mac

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7937875/on-mac-quicken-subscription-new-user-trying-to-understand-logic-of-payee-field

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7916340/how-can-i-find-information-regarding-clearing-memorized-payees-in-quicken-mac

Thank you for any insight.

Quicken Michael

Hi @mybank2002

What are you describing sounds strange. It might be possible many years ago Quicken did not clean up unused payees. Is it possible that these were created years ago?

If possible we would like to look at your data file and investigate.

Could you please navigate to Help > Report a problem within your Quicken program and submit a problem report with log files, screenshots, and sanitized data file attached? A sanitized file is a data file that removes personally identifiable information so you can comfortably share this file with the Quicken team.

Thank you!