Hi Cal.

I accept that there may be some benefit to exploring the way Money chenges
the payee details, but I can't see that there's any problem with how it's
doing this, at least not with this transaction.

Also, you've still not given any indication of how all this relates to the
problem of Money allocating a category incorrectly. You said in your first
response "Money keys off of the Payees for its first assumption of the
category.", but haven't given any details of how it does this or, given that
Money doesn't do this for all transactions, why it always tries to for every
payment to this payee.

What rules does money use to determine whether to assign a category and how
does ith then know which one to use? Clearly the process is not working
properly, but if I could see what's going on I might be able to see where
it's going wrong.

Having a program make decisions for the user is only of benefit if the
process is smart enough to learn from the user's input or the user has
direct control of the criteria/procedure it uses to reach those decisions.
In this case Money's decision is incorrect and I can't see how it could be
related to any of the choices I've made. I have also had no input relating
to the procedures used, but if I could I'd pobably be able to correct the
problem.

If you don't know how to access/change this aspect of Money, do you know any
other MVPs who might be able to help? It seems like it's a fairly
specialised area.

--------
Plegron

"Cal Learner-- MVP" <via_newsgroup[at]please.tnx> wrote in message
news:r8h5m3hercc3dvvqtebaf0o92evjoolepn[at]4ax.com...
- quote -

In microsoft.public.money, Plegron wrote:

- quote -


OK. If that is a generally a correct association, then you would not
want to add the entry to the Excluded Payee Names. There were
associations that you did not want. Those could be candidates for
Excluded Payee Names.

Thanks Cal, but the payee name variation appears to be working fine.

Money changed the payee from

"P5505665002851045 MS CARD SERVICES"

to "Morgan Stanley", which is exactly what I want. Why are you suggesting
making changes that will stop this correct behaviour from happening? How
does this relate to the problem of the transaction being wrongly assigned to
'Bank Charges'? What's the connection?

--

Plegron Snaith

"Cal Learner-- MVP" <via_newsgroup[at]please.tnx> wrote in message
news:dn95m39agoq2hr5q5c9sim8vavm0oft8gi[at]4ax.com...
- quote -

In microsoft.public.money, Plegron wrote:

- quote -

So you will want to add "MS CARD SERVICES" to the Excluded Payee
Names. That, together with the Standardized Payee Names thing,
should cause the Payee to be essentially ignored. You will then have
to name the Payee or leave it blank.

See below.

- quote -

The effect you fear can happen. Once you make the suggested changes,
growth should slow. Now if you consolidate Payees via Delete or
Move, you can trim out unused Payees from the file with a trick:
File-> Archive, specifying a date that predates the first transaction
in your file. Specify a date such as 1/1/1970. I suggest you not
specify a date where you will lose transactions. People often regret
doing that.

Thanks Dick.

I don't see how this can be anything other than a Money problem, but see my
previous reply to Cal Learner's suggestion as it gives a more complete
discussion.

I'd love to use a direct connection, but sadly the UK has not adopted this
technology yet so I'm stuck with downloading and importing QIFs. It's a
cumbersome procedure and isn't worth doing more regularly than once a month,
so it's not easy to keep up-to-date, but it's still way better than having
to enter things manually even with the problems and foibles Money adds. I
say this because I've never experienced a problem that I've been able to
attribute to an error in the downloaded data. A QIF file may be very basic
and a little crude, but it's simplicity makes it quite robust in that it's a
very easy file for FIs to create and any problem can be easily seen in a
text editor.

--

Plegron Snaith


"Dick Watson" <littlegreengecko[at]mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote in
message news:OVgR0ObPIHA.1208[at]TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...
- quote -

Thanks for your help, Cal.

I'm familiar with using a text editor to examine QIF files and can see
nothing about the transaction that could be interpreted by Money in a way
that would make the assigning of any category a logical action. The text
lines fort the transaction are:

D03-12-07
P5505665002851045 MS CARD SERVICES
T-1680.36
^

The payee details correctly get changed to "Morgan Stanley" as the Payee
Rules Manager includes the downloaded payee text string in the Payee Name
Variation list. I have also checked the entries in
Banking-> AccountTools-> Categories&Payees-> Payees-> PreferredPayeeNames, as
you suggested, but as far as I can see this is working fine and there are no
incorrect entries in the list so I haven't changed anything here.

I don't understand how this has any bearing on the category assignment. How
and why it gets assigned to the 'Bank Charges' category is still a mystery.
What's the connection?

I guess I could tidy up the 'Payee Name Variation' list or the 'Preferred
Payee Names' (these appear to be slightly different views of the same
information), deleting the old entries. Is it safe to do this? I guess it
won't affect any items already entered and any new variations can be added
as they appear. Starting with a clean list would eliminate this as part of
the problem, but I still don't see the connection between the this function
and the category assignment.

One thing I don't understand is why there are so many duplicated entries in
the 'Preferred Payee Names' list. It's as if one gets added every time I
confirm a variation has been correctly changed. Surely, this must lead to a
slowing down of the program if these are allowed to accumulate over an
extended period of time? Does Money perform some clever analysis of these
entries taking into account the number of times a particular entry exists?
Seems unlikely.

--

Plegron Snaith


"Cal Learner-- MVP" <via_newsgroup[at]please.tnx> wrote in message
news:40t2m3lf877n0uoi67gtcuu0smv7162ppf[at]4ax.com...
- quote -

In microsoft.public.money, Plegron wrote:

- quote -

Money keys off of the Payees for its first assumption of the
category.

Look at your QIF file with a text editor such as Notepad. Note lines
that start with 'P'. Those are the Payees. If those are legitimate
Payees, then ***** on.

If those are actually lines like 'PPOS Transaction' or
'PDebit 70234223', then take positive action: make Money ignore
terms with the Payee Rules Manager, that lets you ignore words
and phrases such as Check, ATM Withdrawal, etc.

Suppose the last incorrect Payee that got associated with such a
transaction is ABCDEFG.

Go to
Banking-> AccountTools-> Categories&Payees-> Payees-> PreferredPayeeNames
which shows how downloaded names are translated into Payees.
Record the Payee Name Variation(s) shown for ABCDEFG. Delete the
entries that are not necessarily ABCDEFG.

Then click on GoToPayeeRulesManager. Excluded Payee Names
identifies words and phrases that should be ignored from the payee
field (e.g., check, deposit). Add each word or phrase that was
listed as a Payee Name Variation that you recorded.

Tools-> Settings-> OnlineServiceSettings-> ShowStandardizedPayeeNames
will cause you to match an existing payee that differ only by a
numbers or punctuation. Click MoreDetails to the right of the
setting for more information. This would handle the case of
'PDebit 70234223'. You would make 'Debit' an Excluded Payee Name,
and let this setting take care of the numbers.

You may want to set
Tools-> Settings-> OnlineServices-> AddADescriptionToTheMemoField




Tools-> Options/Settings-> OnlineServices-> ShowStandardizedPayeeNames
[M07]Tools-> Settings-> OnlineServiceSettings-> ShowStandardizedPayeeNames
will cause you to match an existing payee that differ only by a
numbers or punctuation. Click MoreDetails to the right of the
setting for more information.

Are you sure this is a Money problem not something traveling with the data
you downloaded? Are you sure this is even something for Money to fix?

QIF transactions generally have their own category and don't need to be not
auto-categorized. Have you ever looked in one of these files with, say,
Notepad?

Have you looked into whether your FI supports OFX ("Direct Connect") or
Yodlee ("Direct Connect via Third Party")? QIF for transaction import was
such a poor technology that most users/FIs abandoned it a decade or so ago.

Have you ever considered just entering the transactions yourself and
skipping all the headaches that come with all of the poorly formed data from
the FIs?

"Plegron" <plegron[at]hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:e1CjU4ZPIHA.5988[at]TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...
- quote -

I'm using Money 2006 Small Business V 15.0.150.513

I've used Money for many years, but refuse to upgrade again because MS just
keeps adding more and more 'flashy' features whilst some of the most
'useful' basic features don't work properly. Here's one that's a real wind
up:

Every month I import my bank statement QIF file and money can't even
categorize the items correctly despite the payee details and amount being
identical to previous ones. Although it does correctly categorize some,
others are either left unassigned or assigned incorrectly. For example, my
monthly credit card direct debit to settle the full balance on my Morgan
Stanley credit card is always categorized as Bank Charges even though I've
never had any bank charges from this payee, there are no other transactions
categorized as such and I correctly recategorize the payment every month .

This is infuriating and shows that the function is not working correctly as
that there's no basis for the incorrect categorization. Money is deciding
that these transactions are bank charges presumably because it's a debit
containing the text string 'morgan stanley'. This is not only incorrect,
but a pretty dumb assumption and when Money also fails to take any notice of
my repeatedly correcting the errors.

Is there a way I can force Money to correctly categorize these transactions
or, failing that, disable it altogether?

Whether this is a bug or just bad design is irrelevant. It's one of the
many unwelcome and unhelpful aspects of behaviour that has been present in
every version of Money I've used. It's about time it was fixed.

--

Plegron Snaith