Find & Replace and/or Import Pre-processing

[veaseym]

Congratulations and thanks for all the hard work on a great piece of software. I've moved across from Quicken and am very impressed. One thing that seems to work better for me is transaction importing in a CSV file, however ...

It would be helpful to be able to pre-process a CSV to i) standardise/simplify payee names and ii) pre-allocate MMEX categories
An example for i) is to regex amazon.co.uk*R?????? to Amazon. For ii), I'm importing new transactions into a category called Temporary and then editing.

Have others looked at this questions and are there recommended solutions.

Also, Quicken does have a good find+replace capability where you can filter according to multiple criteria (like the MMEX Transaction Report Filter) and then apply a global Replace to any field - that would be very useful.

[frankieorabona]

This discussion reminded me of a related question I posted some time ago on the MMEX forum,
regarding two CSV import options that seem closely connected to this topic:

viewtopic.php?p=26258#p26258

Specifically, I asked about:
- Pattern match Payees
- Add match details to Notes

My issue was that many banks don’t provide a dedicated “Payee” field,
so I was trying to find a way to duplicate the description column and use that for both "Payee" and "Notes",
so that I could leverage MMEX's matching system — ideally using regex — to simplify payee management.

Unfortunately, I never got a definitive answer on how these features work when no explicit payee field is provided by the bank.
It seems very relevant to this discussion about **pre-processing CSV data** and using find/replace patterns.

I'm following this thread with great interest and I truly hope this could lead
to some improvements or clear guidance in this area — it would be really helpful for many users like me!