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Does payee list size impact QM2015 performance?

BillBill Member ✭✭
edited October 2018 in

Comments so far show QM2015 clearly inherited both good and bad features of QEM, QMac, QWindows versions (like children from their family tree). I truly love my QEM simplicity and ease of use. Very few added features in QM2015's first release are seducing me. The spectre of possibly degrading the peace of mind I enjoy with QEM currently keeps me in a holding pattern while I wait for the dust to settle -- or worse, Intuit stops supporting QEM simply to spur revenue from upgrades.

Experienced users (and I am one, from both Windows and Mac versions) know payee lists grow exponentially over time in any version or platform. That's especially annoying when I enter a frequently used payee slightly differently from purchase to purchase, or a financial institution does the same in a download (like appending a store number to a large merchant's name). It's a minor irritation when I enter transactions manually and see multiple automatic fill-ins. But more worrisome are reports of performance degradation from long payee lists.

My Question: How does QM2015 handle both growth and housekeeping? (In QEM, cleanup is tedious. A user has to view a payee list then combine similar ones. If I made an error long ago and deleted a "bad" name in a transaction, it's still listed. There is no "delete unused payees" button as there is with categories. But, conveniently, a failsafe warning does pop up when I try to delete a payee currently in a transaction.)


Comments

  • J_MikeJ_Mike SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited October 2018

    From my experience QMac2015 is very similar to QEM as to handling Payees.


    There are two significant improvements introduced with QMac2015;


    1) The Payee List has added a Status column and unused payees are noted. Lack of a note implies the payee is in use.


    2) QEM added virtually every downloaded FI Payee to the list - even when the user had established a preferred name. QMac2015 does not do this and it keeps the list much cleaner.





    FWIW, I have expended considerable time and effort in cleaning up the Payee List using the Merge and editing features - e.g., consolidating all the variations for 'Wal Mart' - various spellings, punctuations, store ID's, transaction date, etc. My list is very clean and now it stays that way.
    QWin & QMac (Deluxe) Subscription
    Quicken user since 1991

  • BillBill Member ✭✭
    edited September 2016
    JM said:


    From my experience QMac2015 is very similar to QEM as to handling Payees.


    There are two significant improvements introduced with QMac2015;


    1) The Payee List has added a Status column and unused payees are noted. Lack of a note implies the payee is in use.


    2) QEM added virtually every downloaded FI Payee to the list - even when the user had established a preferred name. QMac2015 does not do this and it keeps the list much cleaner.





    FWIW, I have expended considerable time and effort in cleaning up the Payee List using the Merge and editing features - e.g., consolidating all the variations for 'Wal Mart' - various spellings, punctuations, store ID's, transaction date, etc. My list is very clean and now it stays that way.

    Great! Thanks.  Nice to see some good news on QMac2015.
  • John_in_NCJohn_in_NC SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited December 2016
    JM said:


    From my experience QMac2015 is very similar to QEM as to handling Payees.


    There are two significant improvements introduced with QMac2015;


    1) The Payee List has added a Status column and unused payees are noted. Lack of a note implies the payee is in use.


    2) QEM added virtually every downloaded FI Payee to the list - even when the user had established a preferred name. QMac2015 does not do this and it keeps the list much cleaner.





    FWIW, I have expended considerable time and effort in cleaning up the Payee List using the Merge and editing features - e.g., consolidating all the variations for 'Wal Mart' - various spellings, punctuations, store ID's, transaction date, etc. My list is very clean and now it stays that way.

    Agreed: there is something quite cathartic about cleaning up your payee list (and then keeping it that way). I find this far easier to do in Essentials/2015 than it ever was in 2007 or earlier. And batch changing things was not possible in the older versions.

    In answer to your questions: in general, the # of payees is not the source of slowdowns. It can be if you have a huge amount of payees, but you would likely be seeing that in 2015 as well. I actually find performance of 2015 far better than Essentials. The default view is all dates for transaction view, and you can do incremental search very quickly.

    That said, a few people have had serious slowdowns, but that appears data file specific (and likely corrupted).

    The biggest complaints for speed I here right now are usually related to people who have a massive amount of securities and updating the prices takes a couple minutes. If you are using Essentials, then that won't be a concern to you.
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