Finding recurring payments

I have a list of payments made from various accounts and I am looking for a way to identify recurring payments. The difficulty is that there are multiple vendors with the same payment amount so it is not as simple as finding duplicate payment values. What I am looking for is a way to find out if Vendor A has made a $700 payment in multiple months, for example. My data population has the payment, vendor name, and payment date available.

I have a felling it shouldn't be as difficult as I am making it.

Thanks,
John

You could do it with a countifs formula, or a pivot table.

=COUNTIFS("Vendor list","Vendor A","Payment",$700)

With pivot, Set rows by vendor name, then payment amount. Set values by count of payment amount.

Does that help?

Thank you for replying but I tried both of those solutions but neither got me the results I was looking for.

I think I misstated something in my original question. The $700 was just used as an example. I am looking for something more general to help me find duplicate payments no matter what the amount. More along the lines of has any vendor in my list paid the same amount in more than one month from January to June?

As long as you're looking for identical amounts, the pivot table method will work.

Can you mock up a sample file, no confidential / personal data, to show the layout that you're working with. Add in some expected reuslts to show how you would like the recurring payments to be listed in the sheet.

I think I solved it. Your pivot table solution got me thinking so i finessed the one I made. I had constructed one similar to the one you suggested except I added Payment Month to Columns. Now I can see if a similar payment has been made in more than one month. Granted I have 110,000 lines of payments to go through so there's going to be some manual labor, but I can pass that on to other people. Haha.

Thank you so much for your help!!!

Something else that just came to mind. Use a copy if the sort order of your data needs to be preserved.

Sort by vendor name, then transaction value, then use a simple formula in an empty column to check if vendor and transaction in any row is identical to its neighbour.

Assuming headers in row 1, data starts in row 2. Vendor name in column B, transaction value in column C. Enter this formula into row 2 of an empty column, then fill down and filter the formula column on TRUE.

It could be done without sorting, but with 110k rows, it would be very slow to process.