Thanks. I have spent my whole day today (and last night)
redownloading, accepting, copying etc, all my transactions from my
current money program into a March backup (current file must be corrupt
since it won't let me Remove All Bills data). I guess I have spent 10
hours so far and I'm still working on it....going line by line in about
40 accounts & several thousand transactions just to track discrepancies
multiple splits/paychecks, tons of matching transfers...SO TEDIOUS!

As soon as I get this March file up to speed, I'm going to use your
method to eliminate some of the payees, AND then I'll try to add my
Bills and Deposits back. (I'm need to be working on extracting records
from a database at work for community college registration, but I just
can't concentrate on that until my file is back in order.... I'm
obsessed!!)

Dick Watson wrote:
- quote -

comments inline.

"Anna" <rhodesbiz[at]bellsouth.net> wrote in message
news:1154585382.094590.322600[at]m73g2000cwd.googlegroups.com...
- quote -

I've never observed a problem but have never rigorously tried to validate
it, either. I don't have Epays. That could very well be a design where the
Epay info make Epay-enabled Payee X a "different" Payee than Payee X without
the Epay info. Don't know for sure, but it wouldn't surprise me.

- quote -

Export an All Transactions, All Dates, All Accounts report without split
information to .CSV. Once in Excel, you can play with the Data|Sort and
Data|Filter|Advanced Filter (unique records) command to get the entries in
the Payees column sorted and down to unique entries.

Thanks for the details. I think I'm on the right track, I just confirm
too many payees. I also try to keep an eye on names like Wal-mart and
Walmart and condense these into one payee.

I'm a little paranoid of deleting payees however. In the past I've had
times when I deleted a Payee and then tried to view the Payee to see
all transactions written to that Payee.... and found only some of the
transactions were viewable, even though the Payee name was the same. In
other words, I would have 10 transactions written to my electric
company... same name,..but when I viewed the Payee, not all of the
transactions to that Payee were listed. I can't remember what I did to
cause this problem, except it had to do with deleting a Payee. It may
have had to do with e-pays only. So that is why I hesitate to delete.
I need to explore this further.

Do you find that if you DO NOT confirm a Payee and therefore it is not
in your explicit list, that you are still able to view ALL transactions
to that payee by right clicking and going to the Payee that way? I'll
play around with this tomorrow and see what happens.

Anyway, thanks for the info. I'm going to try and export the payees
into Excel and see what I have.

Anna



Dick Watson wrote:
- quote -

I've also once or twice scanned this normalized list looking for obvious
entry errors I've made like two different spellings for some restaurant or
Wal Mart vs. WalMart vs. Wal-Mart or similar kinds of stuff. Occasionally
these things creep in--usually the "Add new payee" triggers me to ask "Why
is this one new? Did I screw up typing the name?" but not always.

"Dick Watson" <littlegreengecko[at]mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote in
message news:OCp1BnrtGHA.1504[at]TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...
- quote -

Comments inline.

"Anna" <rhodesbiz[at]bellsouth.net> wrote in message
news:1154564839.734195.114250[at]b28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
- quote -

Yes.

- quote -

Yes.

- quote -

Yes.

- quote -

Because I've a) gotten all transactions out through MoneyLink into Excel and
used Excel to sort and then normalize--i.e., remove duplicates--and done a
count, and b) taken all transactions out through a .CSV exported report for
all transactions all accounts all dates and then dome some database magic,
as part of my Project Dinero reverse engineering exercise, to bring these
into a normalized Payees table in Access and counted them that was as well.

- quote -

I don't download transaction data, so I avoid this issue.

- quote -

Confirm payees option and lots of saying no. Bear in mind that I'm
obsessive-compulsive about collecting data and have over thirteen years of
data in the file. Periodically I go prune obsolete or now irrelevant (in
engineering management parlance OBE--overcome by events) payees from the
explicit list.

- quote -

Maybe not. You got three Yes answers in a row.

Dick,
You mention your explicit payees. Are these the ones you have in your
Payee list when you click on Payees? Do you limit these by checking the
"Confirm payees" option? You also mention 1400 in the database. Are you
referring to the ones that are just listed in your registers or
accounts as the payee? And how do you know how many are there?

Also, do you have the "Show standardized payee names" checked? I've
tried that before and never liked the results.

I am trying to figure out a better way to handle all my payees, so can
you give me feedback on how you limit yours? Maybe I'm missing
something.


Anna








Dick Watson wrote:
- quote -

My results: Was 56,196MB, Now 56,220MB. It night shrink at some point in the
future after a compacting cycle. Tough to say. Clearly the scavenging
algorithm didn't feel compelled to go compacting just yet. The file doesn't
seem any faster/slower, but evaluation of that is very limited and
subjective. Certainly if any performance benefit is there, it isn't dramatic
like the results from the nuke-the-bills exercise.

YMMV.

Barring anybody posts a better explanation of what this is really doing and
I come up with some way to validate the data after doing it, I probably will
not continue with this file.

Note I've had auto-add of Payees turned off for a decade or more. My
explicit list has never had more than maybe 50 or 100. I have something like
1,400 payees total in the data. My results might have been different if I'd
ever had thousands of garbage downloaded payee names auto-added to the
explicit list.

I've been trying to finish some M07-related http://umpmfaq.info updates. (So
many interruptions, so little time.) Barring some spectacular reports for
this method, it won't make this cycle. Nuke-the-bills ("bills-be-gone"?
That's pretty good, too...), however, merits a mention.

"Dick Watson" <littlegreengecko[at]mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote in
message news:%23gTMH8LtGHA.2036[at]TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
- quote -

Interesting question. My mental model of the internals (knowing nothing of
the real internals, I've had to conjure them up in my own mind, in part for
my Project Dinero reverse engineering exercise) is that all Payees have a
key and some Payees (the "explicit" ones) have details. If this is the case,
I'm not sure what would be removed unless a "deleted" explicit Payee--though
still implicit as long as the name appears in any transactions--still has
details. It's hard to imagine why that would have significant detritus, but
the bills thing was kind of an eye-opener as well.

I'll try and play around with this tonight.

"Cal Learner-- MVP" <via_newsgroup[at]please.tnx> wrote in message
news:h7asc21nkk1psk4v2q35n0j38l58la8pa3[at]4ax.com...
- quote -

In addition to the draconian File-> Repair-> RemoveAllBillsData
method, there is a more subtle thing that might improve things for
some who have upgraded to Money 2007-- especially for files with a
lot of history. Archive! (but there is a caveat)

A feature has been added where Money removes deleted Payees when you
Archive, rather than just hiding them. Thus there may be some
detritus to remove. But we know the downside of Archive: removing
old transactions that we may have some need for. The way to avoid
that is to specify a date *earlier* than your earliest transaction.
Thus no transaction actually gets removed. Perhaps you want to
select 1/1/1960. Selecting a date that causes some transactions to
be removed is still not a good idea for most people.

It would be good to keep an extra copy of your file before doing
this. And in this case, I am thinking more about size comparisons. I
don't know if anybody will have much size change. The real thing
sought would be some performance, but that would be harder to
measure.

So this is a special case for those who had decided to never
archive. Let us know if it helped or did not.