Community Discussion: Phantom memorized payees
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I have seen the same problem (though only relatively recently - nowhere near as far back as Q2007) - the bug is present in R47.11).
I have attributed the problem to a Quicken bug that expresses itself when the user employs Find/Replace to modify multiply transactions. It's as if, during that process, Quicken incorrectly assumes that Auto-memorize payees is turned on so each modified transaction gets memorized.
[User QWinUser reports finding the same problem.]I haven't tried to distinguish whether the problem occurs for a particular field being replaced (such as Payee), or whether every transaction modified is also "memorized"; and I always forget to look for the problem immediately after I do a Find/Replaces - so I frequently get unpleasantly surprised.
I usually realize I have a problem when I discover some transaction with strange characteristics; such as a Category, Tag or Memo I know I did not assign. When I then look in the Memorized Payee List, I see MANY payees I know I never memorized, with characteristics I would never have memorized.
I do use Memorized Payees, but only sparingly - and I always keep the "Automatically memorize memorize new payees" option turned off. And when I memorize payees, I virtually never memorize the amount (I have 155 manually memorized payees ... and only one has a non-zero amount).
It's a pain in the ass to fix the Memorized Payee List, but my criteria for memorizing payees (which is that I almost never memorize amounts), helps me here. I sort the Memorized Payee List by amount, then mass delete all the payees with a non-zero amount (except the one that belongs).
[Last Community post: July 18,2023 @ 5:00PM]