Create a tab for payees that mirrors the dropdown payee list for reports

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Quicken has tabs for memorized payees and categories, but there is no tab for payees. When doing a report and selecting categories or accounts, the dropdown list mirrors the categories tab. It is possible to go into either tab and edit the lists. If you try to delete a category, there is an error message that the category is in use and gives options on how to proceed.

It would be very helpful if a tab for payees could be created. It should work exactly the same as the categories list — mirror the dropdown list that comes up when creating a report, add a payee, edit or delete a payee. Without this, the dropdown list of payees continues to grow year after year, even though some of the payees haven't been used in years. The payees, categories, memorized payees would only show in the current year list unless you want to carry them forward from the previous year(s) or into future years.

How a dedicated payee list would help:

1) Creating a report where you need to choose payees would be much simpler as the list to choose from would be shorter.

2) The payees list could be reviewed regularly to make sure there are no similar payees so they could be easily combined into one payee without having to create a renaming rule. ie Cash Withdrawal and Cash withdrawal would become one payee instead of two

3) As with the memorized payees options, payees not used in X number of months would automatically be deleted.

4) The existing report dropdown payees list could finally be cleaned up.

5) It would save time users spend trying to find out how to delete unused payees.

UKR

You cannot delete Payees from a report customization or selection list for as long as there is a single transaction in existence using said Payee Name.
To clean up the list of Payees, try using Edit > Find/Replace to rename payee names and combine variations of the same name to a single payee name, e.g., to get a payee name = "Starbucks" instead of
"POS TRANS 070124 STARBU", "POS TRANS 070224 STARBU", "POS TRANS 070324 STARBU".
Use Renaming Rules to create new downloaded transactions with correct, "clean" Payee Names and prevent the above from reoccurring.
After cleanup, the selection list of Payee Names will be much cleaner and much more meaningful.

You cannot delete Categories from the Category List for as long as there is a single transaction in existence using said Category. When the Usage count is zero, then you can delete unused categories except those considered "builtin" and required for proper Quicken operation.
Edit > Find/Replace will help you assign new categories to transactions, among other methods to recategorize transactions.