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!

[Renato]

I would look for more information under these posts.

https://github.com/moneymanagerex/money ... ed-desccsv
https://github.com/moneymanagerex/money ... ed-desccsv

[Nancy76]

First of all, I’d like to say that signing up to this forum has been quite an odyssey
I'm currently using Firefox, but I was only able to complete the registration and login
by switching to another browser. I honestly don’t think it should be this complicated just to join a support forum.

That aside, I’m writing because I’m very interested in this topic.

I’m currently trying to import data from a CSV file and was hoping to automatically assign
a payee or category based on keywords in the Notes field.
For example: if the Notes contain “Amazon”, I’d like MMEX to automatically assign the payee “Amazon”.

I took a quick look at the GitHub links that were shared earlier,
but none of them seem directly related to editing or assigning the Payee during CSV import.
With 21 and 118 pages of issues, maybe the links were too generic —
or perhaps the topic just hasn’t been addressed clearly yet.

It would be super helpful to have a simple tutorial showing how to configure this.
For example:

Code: Select all

If Notes contains "AMAZON" → set Payee to "Amazon"
If Notes contains "CONAD" → set Category to "Groceries"

But here’s the part I really don’t understand:

The options “Pattern match Payees” and “Add match details to Notes” are always disabled
unless I explicitly map a column as "Payee" during import.
Yet if I already had a proper Payee column, I wouldn’t need to extract it using matching rules!

Here’s what I see when I try to import a CSV file (screenshot):

Immagine 2025-11-15 115753.jpg (138.62 KiB) Viewed 1 time

As you can see, both options are greyed out even though the Notes clearly contain useful descriptions.
It feels like this matching feature could be very useful,
but I honestly don’t understand how it’s meant to be used in real-world situations.

Any help or clarification would be greatly appreciated —
especially if there’s a trick or workaround I’m missing!

Thank you!