Payees allow you to assign a common definition to transactions that apply to the same business or person. For instance, there could be many Starbucks coffe shops in the city, each having different transaction memo fields, but as far as you're concerned all of the refer to the same business. A payee can have a category assiciated with it which is helpful when categorizing transactions: when a payee is set for the transaction, transaction's category will be set to the same category as the payee's. Payee view allows you to setup and maintain Payee definitions.