Payees should be just that

[Amazone]

Sorry if I always seem to be complaining.
Your program is great.
However I seem to use it differently.
I do not upload my bank statements. I print those and then enter everything in More Money.
At this point I only work with Investments and a few small accounts.
I have not entered main account with all my expenses.
So I do not have a lot of payees at the moment.
I want to enter a payment.
In payees I get proposed :
My bank accounts. Those are not payees but bank accounts
Currencies
Interests received (income payees should not show for an expense)
A lot of transfers to and from deleted accounts (this is linked to import of Portefolios.

I would consider to clean up the payees.
However I am afraid that doing this I might make changes to things previously entered.

In the past I archived my Microsoft Money every 3 years.
This way I could clean up my payees.
Microsoft showed the payees that were not used greyed out and you could delete those.
I have moved 4 years ago and now live 120km further so many of the payees in my old town will never be used again

[Campbell]

Yes, I've noticed that too. I actually put a fix in very recently which should stop the accounts being created as payees, but it doesn't remove them if already created.

It won't be possible to delete a payee that is currently assigned to a transaction. But I'll make a note of improving this, so it will distinguish the payees that are unassigned (e.g. if the transaction it was used in no longer exists) and allow those to be removed.

[Campbell]

Sorry if I always seem to be complaining.

Not, I think it’s great. I need people to tell me what they’re not happy with or what I could improve, otherwise I won’t know how to make the application the best it can be.

[Amazone]

Yes, I've noticed that too. I actually put a fix in very recently which should stop the accounts being created as payees, but it doesn't remove them if already created.

It won't be possible to delete a payee that is currently assigned to a transaction. But I'll make a note of improving this, so it will distinguish the payees that are unassigned (e.g. if the transaction it was used in no longer exists) and allow those to be removed.

But the problem is that all the transactions still exist I think. Is there a way to find out?

[Campbell]

I'll be adding a "find all transactions" option on payees, so this will be a useful way to tidy it up.

[Ron]

Moneyspire allows you to close old payees in drop down lists when entering a new transaction and MMEX allows you to hide them which is essentially the same. This seems like the neatest solution to retaining old payees and their transactions but not getting in the way when entering new transsctions. There is a check box to hide or close payees when you edit the payee in the payee manager on the tools list.

[Campbell]

I've had a quick look at Moneyspire, but can't work out what you mean about closing payees when entering a new transaction? This is the add transaction form as I see it:

image.png (13.42 KiB) Viewed 289 times

[Amazone]

I started this thread because I get things in payees that are not really payees.

In Microsoft Money I can make a list of payees with last date payed:

image.png (91.38 KiB) Viewed 286 times

Those that have no dates can be safely removed.
BUT :
In Microsoft Money you can Archive your file and then delete all transactions before a date you choose.
I always archived my files after 4 years and then deleted all transactions except the last six months.
The only transactions that were not cleaned up were investment transactions.
But I could then remove the unused payees and keep my list manageable
I moved to a new regio and most of my payees became obsolete

At the moment I use Maxim Money only for my investment accounts.
For my normal accounts I would make a new file and then I could also save these files every 4 years keeping the last 6 months and then clean up the payees if I could get a list with those not used.

[Campbell]

Ok, thanks. I think I understand the problem, basically a way to remove any unused payees, to tidy up the data and prevent them coming up as suggestions when they are no longer being used (which should also speed up the performance of the payee dropdown). I'll have a think about how best to do this.

[Amazone]

As said before there should be a way to clean up the payee list.
As said before also - I understand it would be a problem to delete a payee if you do not use him anymore because it might influence past transactions.
Could it be possible to hide payees?
I think you did it with Investments