Payees and Categories

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Categories and Payees

My Money keeps track of where your money comes from and where it goes with categories and payees. For example, if you buy groceries at several different stores, you can tell My Money to use the same "Groceries" category each time you record a payment to any of those stores in any account register. You can also assign a payee to this transaction to differentiate between "Stop and Shop", "Star Market", or any other grocery shops that you normally shop at. Then, at the end of the month, you can create a report or graph that shows how much you spent on groceries that month. You can further analyze your spending or income patterns by looking at a detailed breakdown of how much you’ve spent or earned for each payee or subcategory as well as see a total for the category.

Organization of Categories

The organization of your categories affects the organization of your reports and charts. If you have a long, detailed category list, your reports and budgets may also be long, but they will be more detailed.

It is important to assign categories and subcategories consistently. For example, if you sometimes assign the category “Business Expense:Auto” to transactions for gasoline, but other times you assign the category and subcategory “Automobile:Fuel,” My Money will two separate amounts in reports: one for “Business Expense:Auto” transactions, and another for “Automobile:Fuel” transactions.

You can use the Merge command if you want to re-categorize or combine these two categories together

Modifying the default category lists

My Money comes with the list of default categories which you may find useful. You can modify a default category list by creating new categories or new subcategories and by editing or deleting existing categories and subcategories. You can also change a category into a subcategory or a subcategory into a category, and you can move subcategories from one category to another.

If you want to restore the default list of Categories you can use the following menu command:

MENU: File->Maintain Data->ReCreate Default Categories


Creating new categories

You can set up your categories before you enter any transactions, or you can set them up "on the fly" while you are entering transactions. My Money will ask if you want to set up a new category whenever you enter a category name it doesn’t recognize.


  1. Choose Transaction Categories from the Lists Manager Tab.
  2. In the Transactions and Categories window, click New.
  3. In the Set Up Category window, enter information about the category.

Image:Newcategory.png


Creating subcategories

Using subcategories gives you more flexibility than using categories alone. For example, under the category "Automobile" you could have subcategories such as "Afermarket Components", "Depreciation" and "Gasoline". Then you can show information for each subcategory

Adding Payees "on-the-fly"

If you prefer you can skip the setup screen for the payees and simply add them to the database once you finished typing a new Payee name in a Transaction form. o enable this functionality please select the following menu:

MENU: View->Options->General

and enable automatic add to the database

Image:Autoaddpayee.png


Tax related transactions

You may want to track your transactions for tax related purposes, the easiest way of doing this is by selecting a check-box on a category or payee setup screen that indicates whether it should be tracked for personal, business or VAT tax purposes. My Money will keep track of these categories and you can run one of the tax reports to show your period totals, such as quarterly tax totals or yearly tax totals.

Editing, deleting, and moving categories and subcategories

You can edit category or subcategory information by selecting a category in the Categories & Transfers list and clicking Edit. If you rename a category or subcategory, My Money automatically replaces the old name with the new name in all transactions categorized with the old name. You can delete a category or subcategory by selecting it in the Transaction Categories list and clicking Delete. When you delete a category or subcategory, My Money removes the name from the Transaction Categories list and from the Category field of any transactions to which it is assigned.

Please note that My Money will allow you to delete a Category or a Payee only if there are no transactions that are using them. If you would like to completely remove a Category please reassign such Category so there are no references to it and then you can delete it completely

Don’t delete a category or subcategory simply as a step in changing its name. Delete a category or subcategory only if you don’t expect to use it again.

Merging Categories and Payees

Merging Categories and Payees allows you to combine erroneously entered or similar entries together. For example, after automatic statement download from a bank you may end up having few Payees that you wan to combine together.

The easiest way of doing it is by using Merge functionality, simply select the Payees or Categories that should be combined, click Merge on the List of Payees or Transaction Categories window and select the destination Category/Payee in the Merge Entries dialog.

Image:Mergepayee.png

My Money automatically replaces the Category/Payee the new name in all transactions categorized with the old name. Old names will be preserved as synonyms, so next time you download a statement the Payee names will match better.

See Data Matching Algorihm for explanation on how synonyms are used throughout the system.

Transaction History

To view a complete history of a particular Category, Sub-Category or a Payee please select History from List Manager - List of Payees or List Manager - Transaction Categories. My Money will select all transactions thtat belong to the selected Category or Payee and will plot a history chart against a specified time period.

Image:Dunkinhistory.png



My Money 2.0 Manual | Set up bills and deposits<<Previous | Next>>My Money Calendar

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