What if I want to clean up duplicate categories and payees in a report?

If your reports show multiple categories or payees for the same item, Quicken provides tools to help you merge or rename them for cleaner, more accurate reporting.

Why duplicates appear

Duplicate categories or payees often result from inconsistent naming or automatic transaction downloads. For example:

• You may have used both Rent and Rent Paid for the same expense.

• Your bank may download “Coffeehouse A” and “Coffeehouse B” even though they’re part of the same chain.

These inconsistencies can make your reports harder to read and less useful for tracking spending.

Use Find & Replace to clean up your data

You can use the Find & Replace tool in any report to update category or payee names across existing transactions:

1. Open the report where duplicates appear.

2. Select Find & Replace in the upper-right corner.

3. Search for the old category or payee name.

4. Replace it with the new name you want to standardize on.

Example: If your report shows both Rent and Rent Paid, you can choose to keep Rent Paid and replace all instances of Rent with that name. Once updated, your report will show just one unified category.

Note: If you're using online bill payments (such as Quicken Bill Manager or your bank’s bill pay service), you may not be able to change the names of online payees. These names are tied to how the service identifies the payee.

Use renaming rules to prevent future duplicates

If your downloaded transactions keep creating payee duplicates:

• Create a renaming rule to automatically standardize payee names going forward.

This ensures that downloaded transactions use the name you prefer (for example, always using “Coffeehouse” instead of variations like “Coffeehouse #23” or “Coffeehouse NW”).

Important: Renaming rules only apply to new downloads. To clean up past transactions, you still need to use Find & Replace.