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

When you look over your report data, you may see instances where you used two or more different categories or payees for the same thing. Quicken includes several tools to help you clean up your data.

If you have several names for the same category or payee, you can use click Find & Replace in the upper-right corner of the report to find the old category and payee names and replace them with new category and payee names. (If you use online payment from within Quicken, either through Quicken Bill Manager or through the bill pay service of a financial institution, you won't be able to modify the names of online payees since that's how that payee is identified.)

For example, say that you discover that you have two categories for the same thing (such as, Rent and Rent Paid). You can choose one category name, such as Rent Paid, and then use Find & Replace to apply the selected name to all of the affected transactions. When you're done, the report displays only the Rent Paid category.

If the reason you have several names for the same payee is that your downloaded transactions make distinctions between payees that don't exist for you (for example, the coffeehouse by your work and the coffeehouse by your home have the same name but are downloaded as different payees), you can create renaming rules so that your downloaded transactions use just the payee name you specify. Keep in mind that renaming rules work only from the point you create them on, so you'll still need to use the Find & Replace feature to clean up your historical data.