"zac" wrote:

- quote -

The Merge function is a little goofy, and convoluted. The instructions and
online help leave a lot to be desired. But with some perserverance and good
fortune, it did work for me... after wasting an hour trying various methods.

Be sure to make a backup your money file first! Any process with this many
convoluted instructions is going to have some potential issues.

First, its important to understand that Merge only seems to work when one
account is setup for Online updates, and the other is not. So, if the
accounts are at the same bank, and are both setup for online update, you need
to Stop online updates for that bank. Before you do this, you need to make
sure that you Accept any already downloaded, but unaccepted transactions, as
they will get deleted when you disable online updates (this is because they
aren't really in the register yet).

Once you've stopped online updates, then you want to re-enable online
updates. This process will present you with an Advanced button, which you
must select. You will be able to select which of the account numbers ou want
to continue tracking via online updates. Select the account that is current
(eg. your new one). In my case, my credit card number changed. so I selected
the account which matched the new credit card number. You want to also
indicate in the upcoming dialog that you do NOT want Money to track the old
account. This seems conter-intuitive, but it is what you want. The next
dialog will warn you that only the newest transactions in your newest account
will be moved into your old (previous, or if you will, original) account.
The "newest" will be all transactions which are newer than the latest
transaction in your original account. Simply put, it will move the new stuff
entered in the new account into the old account, but it doesn't want to
create duplicates, so it will copy only the items after the latest
transaction date in the old account. Shesh! How do you get arround this?
You either need to delete, or re-date your old transactions in the old
account to be prior the first (i.e. oldest) transaction in your newest
account. The dialog will indicate this, and will give you the cutoff date.
If you need to, cancel the wizard, and go do what's necessary in the old
account.

Its going to work like the example diagram below. Original account and
transactions on the left, newer account that you want to merge into the older
account on the right. All transactions from the newer account will be merged
into the orginal acccount, but only after the 1/5/2006 (the latest date).
So, if you want transaction W to transfer, you need to change dates on
transactions C and D, or delete them. You can restore them after the merge
if necessary.

Original Acct Newer,unwanted account
-------------- ------------------------------
1/1/2006 A
1/2/2006 B
1/4/2006 C
1/5/2006 D <--- 1/4/2006 W (will NOT xfer, will delete)
__________ <--- 1/6/2006 X (will xfer)
__________ <--- 1/7/2006 Y (will xfer)
__________ <--- 1/9/2006 Z (will xfer)

Now, go ahead and do the Merge. The online setup data from the newer
account will be transfered to the original older account, along with the
newer transactions from the newer account.

Hope this helps!

Hi... I am using Money Small Business 2006... does anyone know why I am
unable to merge duplicate accounts? I had problems downloading
statements so had to create new accounts.. ie: checking, checking #1,
checking #2.. How can I merge all of these back into one account?
When I try to merge duplicate accounts, it says there are no accounts
to merge. Any ideas on how I can condense all of my data? The only
way I can figure it out so far is to go to each individual transaction
in the duplicate accounts, right click and choose copy to account.
This will take forever that way. Is there a way to choose that option
for every transaction in the account?

Thanks for any help with this !