I understand what you say and agree completely. I have always been able to
get rid of phantom bills by editing them from the budget summary. I use
"this series will end at some point in time." But if your edit dialog does
not pop up you are stuck.

The solution is probably never going to come from MSFT especially if they
get away with the mandatory upgrade deal they are now trying. If people
continue to upgrade to avoid expiration of downloads MSFT looses all
incentive to improve Money substantively. Therefore I refuse to upgrade
under any circumstances until MSFT backs off this policy. I hope enough
folks boycott Money upgrades to force MSFT to change course.

There is another solution. If you export all of your data and then
re-import it back into a new Money file you will get rid of the phantom
bills. This is a pretty big hassle but it works. After the import, you
will have to recreate your scheduled bills and your budget. I just did this
project earlier this year and it made my Money file smaller and faster and
my budget is now clean and fast.

Regards

Bill Wood


"Robert Blanch" <RobertBlanch[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:E20659E3-4DCE-453D-8BEB-F6544C154F6A[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

I'm posting this here because I've had a lot of trouble with phantom bills in
my budget and none of the solutions proposed seem to have worked. I sometimes
delete and modify bills for various reasons, but one main reason is to force
the budget to reflect a certain amount in a prior month (so that my year-end
totals are accurate). Doing so obviously leaves phantom bills in my Money
file, which sometimes I can work around. I am frustrated now because somehow
I ended up with the phanom bills being uncategorized. So they are showing up
on my budget as "Uncategorized Income" and there is no way to move or delete
that category. Trying to edit a phantom bill from budget summary does nothing
(when I choose a bill and click OK nothing happens--no Edit Bill screen
appears). So my budget is completely erroneous and practically useless.

What frustrates me most is that this has been an issue repeatedly discussed
on Microsoft forums and tracked in Microsoft bug databases for years.
Everybody knows about it, and most computer-saavy users have found
time-consuming and tedious methods to work around it. Anyone who uses both
recurring bills and budget planner will encounter it eventually. Oh, why
can't someone at Microsoft provide a fix?? Why can't someone there come up
with a reliable solution? I mean, what DO they fix every year when they come
out with new releases? Is there only one programmer working on Money? Do they
just change the year on the box and re-release the same software? Do they
purposefully leave bugs so that people will buy the next year's release?

Look, all you need is a dialog box that lets you edit the amount of each of
these phantom bills, or delete them all together--so that you can keep your
budget clean and neat or modify last month's budgeted amounts. While you're
at it, let the user decide if recurring bills will appear in the budget to
satisfy those who don't want the ability at all (I'm not one of them, I just
want to have some sense of control).

Is there a reason Microsoft can't put a programmer on the project? I'm sure
it would take less than a month--and we've been waiting for years. Nobody
wants to recreate their entire Money file by exporting and importing! We
don't want to be forced into using Quicken by something so minor yet
unnerving!

Anyway, there's my two cents worth.

--
Robert Blanch