Can the CONTACT file/list be edited or pruned?
If by “CONTACT” you mean a customer, yes. Under the Customers tab, click on Edit for the customer you wish to delete. At the bottom of the screen is a Delete button. But, of course, Manager will not let you delete a customer for whom there are transactions, because that would throw the books off.
The bank account transaction sheet has a DESCRIPTION and CONTACT columns. The contact coumn has a memory associated with it. It is this memory I am referring to.
Hope this clarifies my query.
I don’t see any memory in that column. For Spend money transactions, I can edit the Payee’s name and the change shows up immediately. If I delete the name, the field shows blank. For Receive money transactions, the same is true for the recipient’s name. What exactly are you doing that demonstrates this memory? I’m interpreting your comment to mean that a contact persists in the transaction list after you’ve done something you believe should change it.
The contact column contains the Payee field which, when edited, does have a memory ie if part enter a payee, a selection of similar appears. It may be better phrased as Payee change
I hope this makes my point clearer.
Yes, @muffin, that is clear. I have no idea exactly how that is implemented, but it functions more as an autofill capability than a memory within the transaction list. As nearly as I can tell, when you spend or receive money (or edit one of those transactions) and begin to enter a name, Manager offers a list of those with whom you’ve had transactions before that contain whatever you’ve typed. I don’t know of any way to edit or delete that list.
Personally, I find it convenient in several situations:
- I can’t remember a payer/payee’s full name
- I do a lot of business with one person and get tired of entering the full name
- I want to maintain consistency in my records, rather than, for example, having some things listed under Robert M. Smith, some under Bob Smith, some under Bobby Smith, and some under R. M. Smith
If you don’t care to use the feature, you can always just keep typing. There is no requirement to choose something from the dropdown list. As the list grows longer and it becomes inconvenient to look through so many names, just type another couple of letters and that generally reduces the options quickly.
@lubos will need to decide whether there is enough interest in an editing capability to add such a feature.
Yeah, it’s just autocomplete for convenience. When you start typing into Payee field, Manager will look up what has been typed in there before to offer some suggestions. I think suggestions are even sorted by frequency by which they have been used so very rarely used contacts shouldn’t pop up too often once you have some history. Is that a problem?
No problem. List being frequency dependent is reassuring. Just wondered if there was a list of payees that could be edited.
Thanks for the replies.
Hi
I posted this request back in 2015.
I would like to be able to tidy up my Payee/Contacts via a Find and Recode function. Often in Reports the Contact/Payee column is shambolic because any old text (or autofill, or no text ) can be entered. Can this request be reconsidered, please?
First, the Find & Recode function only applies to the accounts to which receipts and payments have been posted. The function operates by replacing one already standard entry with another already standard entry. For example, you can move postings in the Travel account to the Motor Vehicle Expenses account if they were erroneously recorded.
Second, an easy way to clean up the Contact fields is by using Batch Update. When the contents of the clipboard have been pasted into a spreadsheet, you can use the spreadsheet’s search function to find and standardize entries. If you think about it, this is more flexible. Using the example I gave in an earlier post, you could change one cell containing Bobby Smith to Robert M. Smith, copy it, then scan down the column and paste the replacement in wherever you see other variants.
You did not state what “Reports” you are referring to. Be aware that, depending on what you are looking at, contents of the Contact column may have come from different fields on different transaction form types. You do not want to be trying to change defined Customer names along with Payee names along with Supplier names along with Payer names. The entire situation you describe seems only to apply to receipts and payments where Payers and Payees were entered manually.
Thanks for your reply, Tut.
I take it that’s a ‘No’ then.
I did not say no, @muffin. I didn’t see anything that could be answered with a yes or no.
Your initial post in 2015 was about limiting the autocomplete options. I thought that had been put to rest four years ago. Now you are suggesting a find and recode function to clean up and standardize mixed contact entries. That’s really something else entirely. My response did three things:
- Explained why find and recode is a completely different thing from what you want to do.
- Suggested a way to quickly clean up your receipt and payment payers and payees with Batch Update. Maybe you could consider this to be like find and recode, in that it could use a find and replace feature in a spreadsheet application. But it would be external to Manager.
- Cautioned you about trying to change things that are properly under control of other tabs.
If you have garbage entries then this would indicate that they have been used in a transaction.
Read this topic, Edit manager suggestion on payee/payer field, where incorrectly entered Payees were removed from the list.
Thanks, Brucanna. This is helpful for preventing future unwanted payee entries in the auto complete list.
You are correct in deducing my problem is with transactions.
Whether at the time of bank statement import or correcting historic bad or missing entries, I hate to have to correct every entry individually, hence desire for batch correction. Idleness on my part…
Thank you and Tut, both.
True, so when an annoying one appears, correct that source transaction and over time the most annoying will disappear without the need to remove all.
This doesn’t diminish your worthy suggestion of batch correction
As an aside, the bank statement import function itself doesn’t put anything into the Payee/Payer field.
For myself, with bank statement import, I leave the Payee/Payer field blank otherwise I would have to edit every imported transaction which kind of defeats the efficiency of the import.
Thanks. Summed up my frustration nicely!