Bulk delete of unused payees?

[Jeff Feit]

As a 20+ year user, I'd like to clean up my payee list, as I have a lot of duplicates caused by downloads where there payee name isn't consistent-- like amazon where every one seems to be different, gas stations that have multiple locations, etc. I used to rename them as I went through the downloads but got away from it. I can use the find/replace function to change them all to the same payee, but is there a way to do a bulk delete of the unused payees once I'm done? That seems to be a manual process where I have to delete/confirm for each one.

[Cal Learner]

Sorta ..

1. Use the "Set up your payees" page.  I have a shortcut set up for Payees.  For deleting, you can sort by the Last Paid column to put the now-unused Payees at the bottom. Delete can be done by key or button. Select the first Payee with a blank Last Paid.  Using keys, this is fast, by putting one finger on DEL and one on Finger. Alternating fingers moves down the list. It is like rocking your hand. I think this is pretty close to what you were asking for. I expect you could delete 100 per minute, once you are on a roll.

 2. Alternatively, from your payees page, choose Move (button at the bottom), rather than delete, you will be asked what payee the old transactions should be moved to. This is still going to be tedious, but I think it also deletes the old Payee name at the same time. Too bad you cannot select more than one at a time. Maybe this is not a timesaver vs using Find and Replace, followed by Deletes.  For deleting, you can sort by the Last Paid column to put the now-unused Payees at the top or bottom. Delete can be done by key or button.  Using keys, this is fast, by putting one finger on DEL and one on Finger. Alternating fingers moves down the list 

3. I have considered making a PocketSense scrubber that would use Python regex to modify transactions on the way in. Thus "ALDI .*" could be  turned into "ALDI". This would require choices as to whether to have the string pairs in a separate data file to be read in by the scrub_*.py file, or if the table would better be hard-coded into the  scrub_*.py file.  The code would not be difficult to implement, but would it be easy enough for users to set up?

[Jeff Feit]

Yeah, I can easily get them all  grouped by sorting columns, but deleting them individually is still tedious even with "2 fingers". Was hoping to find a way to select the entire group and delete them.

[Cal Learner]

I understood what you wanted, and I think my suggestion gets very close. In 10 minutes, you should be able to delete 1000 unused payees. 

Now that may not be 10 minutes of your favorite activity. It is more fun to get some thing that runs "keyboard macros" on Windows. But that would take much longer (1 or 2 hours?) to search out and practice. Once you have that mastered, you could probably kill 1000 entries in 2 minutes... maybe more fun. https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comments/1gpqacg/free_macro_recording_software/ is one discussion.

[Tom Roberts]

Cal, i very much like your practical approaches to problem solving. If you're not an engineer then you have the right mindset for one.

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