Merge Payees and QuickFill Rules tabs (Q Mac)
Scott Rose
Mac Beta Beta
Hi there,
I'm confused about the difference between Payees vs. QuickFill Rules. Why do we have 2 separate tabs for what is essentially the same thing?
If I have a Payee in my system, then I always want Quicken to QuickFill SOMETHING for them. I don't understand why these 2 tabs can't be merged into one. It's very confusing to me.
Thanks for any insights!
I'm confused about the difference between Payees vs. QuickFill Rules. Why do we have 2 separate tabs for what is essentially the same thing?
If I have a Payee in my system, then I always want Quicken to QuickFill SOMETHING for them. I don't understand why these 2 tabs can't be merged into one. It's very confusing to me.
Thanks for any insights!
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Thank you for visiting the Community and sharing this request to have the Payee and QuickFill tabs merged in Quicken for Mac!
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Thank you,
Quicken Natalie
I don't see any problem having this information in two tabs, as well as the third tab for renaming rules. It's easy to switch between the tabs, in my opinion.
Renaming rules are only for automatically downloaded transactions, correct? That tab seems to make sense to me.
Also, do you have any idea as to why we can’t DELETE payees? I have about 8,000 payees, most of which I will never use again. I would love to delete all the payees and start from scratch.
And I still don't see the problem with the current implementation. There are different attributes for each Payee. Some stats are shown in the main Payees tab for all Payees, others are shown for renaming rules (when they exist), others are shown for QuickFill rules (when they exist).
It's a relational database. The Payee names are used in transactions. If you edit the name of a Payee, it changes in every transaction that used that Payee. So you can't delete a Payee, because that Payee is used in transactions.
You can mark Payees as hidden, so they won't pop up in menus as you're entering new transactions. If you do that so they aren't cluttering up your menus, why do you care if they still exist in your database for your historical transactions?
But there is a solution, if you don't care to maintain the Payee names in your historical transactions: instead of deleting a Payee, merge it out of existence. Create a Payee called "Deleted Payee" or something similar. Then select some Payees you no longer want to see, plus the "Deleted Payee", and click Merge. Select that you want these merged into "Deleted Payee". All the other Payee names will be deleted, and all those transactions will change the Payee name to Deleted Payee. You can merge two or two hundred Payees at a time, so this is something you can do in bits and pieces over time, if this is a project you consider worthwhile.
Thanks for your thoughts!
I tried making ALL of my payees as hidden, but all of them still show up in Quicken Mac and they still show up in Quicken Mobile. So the entire product line doesn't even respect the "hidden" checkbox. (Quicken Mobile is the worst offender here, because it's so incredibly slow on iOS. Maybe it's faster on Android.)
So yes, I don't care if Quicken keeps track of all my payees behind the scenes, but I don't want to keep seeing all of the payees every time I type in new entries in Quicken Mobile and Quicken Mac.
Yet the "hidden" checkbox is ignored across the product line.
So, for the 3500 payees that you don't have QuickFill rules for, you type in the payee name and every other field shows up blank? What's the advantage of this?
This is a great tip, but then I would lose access to my historical transaction records for payees that I've paid over time. I'm looking for the days of Quicken Mac 2007, where we could just delete payees from Quicken's "memory" so they don't pop up when we're typing in new transactions, but not wipe out historical data.
It seems like the "hidden" checkbox could solve this problem, but the hidden checkbox is not respected across the product line.
And yes, hiding the Payee should do what you want... mostly. The Payee won't show up in the dropdown menus of payee matches when you type a payee name -- but it may still come up in he Payee field as a suggestion, which you can simply overtype. For example, let's say you had a Payee called Dogs-R-Us that you used to use. When you type "Dogs" in the Payee field, it shows up as a suggestion in the Payee field itself, and also in the list of "Best Matches" in the menu. If you proceed to Hide this Payee, if will no longer show up in the list of "Best Matches". But it will still show up in the Payee field, where you can either use it or type the new Payee "Doggie Day Care" you're wanting to use. In short, having the hidden Payee name show up in the Payee field doesn't slow you down or cause any problem.
I don't use the mobile app at all, so I can't comment on it or test it. It works well for some people and others have various problems with it, but I can't help there. You should post in the Quicken Mobile section of the forum if that's where the problem is (I don't see those categories).
Well, it wasn't by my choice; it was a quirk of how they initially created QuickFill rules several versions back; not all my transactions go made into QuickFill rules. I was only noting that in the several iterations of the development of QuickFill rules, it was clear from this forum that some people want them basically on all the time and other people want them mostly off. (Why do some want it off? They want only the Payee name; they don't want splits, memos, amounts, tags auto-entered because their transactions vary.) That's why we ended up having a system-wide preference for creating QuickFill rules, as well as an option for overriding the preference for creating QuickFill rules on every transaction. Since I manually enter a lot of my transactions, I can also quickly bypass auto-fill by holding down Option as I tab out of the Payee field -- a Quicken 2007 shortcut we got them to bring over -- so I feel I have pretty complete control over Payees now.
I never thanked you for this very informative & very helpful message, so thank you!
And thank you for giving me some sense of closure that the days of Quicken 2007 are over.
I actually didn't realize that there was a difference between "Best Matches" and the Payee Name showing up in the Payee field itself as a "type-ahead autofill" option.
That's what my most recent frustration was — that hidden payees still automatically show up in the Payee field itself as I type a Payee. But sure enough, as you said, hidden Payees DON'T show up in the list of "Best Matches". (I just wish there was a way to hide them from showing up in the type-ahead autofill option as well — I'll put this in as a feature request.)
Also, I'm not able to get the same behavior that you are getting with holding down the OPTION key when tabbing out of the Payee field. Could you explain this to me a little bit further?
Thanks again!
As for the Option-Tab feature, my advice was incorrect, because the behavior has changed through all the tweaks to how QuickFill worked, and I don't think I had realized it when I was posting that 6 weeks ago.
Currently, if you want to select an existing Payee name, but not have other fields auto-populated, as you type enough letters for the Payee to show in the Best Matches list, there will be two (or more) entries for the same Payee in that list: the first is just the "naked" Payee name and the second is the Payee plus the QuickFill data you've told/allowed Quicken to previously save. If you want to "override" the QuickFill data from populating -- e.g. prevent it from auto-filling these fields -- you simply select the first instance of the Payee name in the list. This is what Option-Tab used to do until recently.
And you if you're an I-prefer-the-keyboard-and-don't-want-to-click person, you can still do this from the keyboard without reaching for your mouse: as you type letters in the Payee field and Quicken presents its Best Matches list, Quicken will automatically highlight the second instance of the Payee name in the list — the one with the Quickfill data — but clicking Up-Arrow will make the "naked" Payee in the list highlighted, and then you can press Tab to select that Payee and move on to the other fields, which will be unpopulated. So Up-Arrow then Tab instead of Option-Tab; slightly different, but it gets the job done.
With all the tweaks the developers made listening to user complaints and requests, I think we have the best of all worlds with ultimate flexibility for how each of us wants QuickFill to work. You can auto-save QuickFill rules as you go, or you can turn that preference off. If you have it on, you can set a preference for whether your QuickFIll rules contain all fields or just the category. Whichever preference setting you pick, you can override it on a transaction-by-transaction basis by checking/unchecking the box in the blue pop-up over the Category field as you create a transaction. And when creating a new transaction, the Best Matches list allows you to select just an existing Payee name or an existing Payee name plus its saved QuickFill field values.
I had often wondered what that "naked" payee name was doing there, and I always just avoided it. Lol. I didn't even try testing it out.
But this behavior makes perfect sense, and it really IS convenient, and that will actually make things MUCH EASIER for me in the future!
In particular, I've been having that ongoing problem with memo/notes getting the wrong information put into them (that I discussed in another thread), so choosing the "naked" payee name can really help me out!
@jacobs, you truly are the master of ALL THE QUICKEN MAC TIPS!!! You know everything about the product, down to the tiniest of details.
THANK YOU!!!