Question about "Pattern match Payees" & "Match details to Notes

[frankieorabona]

I'm trying to better understand two options in the CSV import process in Money Manager EX. Specifically, I’m not sure how the following features work:

Pattern match Payees
Add match details to Notes
Could someone explain what these functionalities do and how they affect data import?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[frankieorabona]

Thank you for your reply! However I still don't understand how this feature works...

I assume that I need to select a field as the payee, but none of the banks I import transactions from provide a payee field. If there were one, I would already be importing it regularly.

So, I still don’t get how this functionality is supposed to work, especially the second option ("Add match details to Notes"). In this case, tooltips would be extremely useful to understand what these options actually do.

Has anyone successfully used these features? How do they work in practice?

Thanks!

[mikhailo2608ilaol]

To clarify what odenper stated above the purpose of the pattern match is to consolidate payees. I live in a town with several Walmart stores and I charge items and groceries at all of them. However each of these stores has a unique payee name but they are all Walmart stores. With this in mind I created a "Walmart" payee for all of them

Payee.jpg

To illustrate how this works in practice I run a SQL query that shows all the Walmart purchases no matter which store it was at.

Matching.jpg

Look at the Notes. The transactions are imported via a QIF file from my credit card company which duplicates the name of the Payee in the Notes field of the QIF file. Appended to this Notes field is a notification that MMEX has seen that it can match the Payee in the QIF file via the regular expression with an existing Payee entry. The real power of this use of the regular expression is that if I were to make a credit charge purchase at new Walmart I had never shopped in before then there is no need for MMEX to create a new Payee for this new Walmart. I must have shopped at dozens of Walmarts over the years and without the use of regular expressions there would be a couple of dozen payees whose only difference is their Walmart store number. The regex allows all such visits to new Walmarts in the future to not have to create a new Payee.

[frankieorabona]

I think I understand how this feature works, but I have a problem...

None of my banks provide a specific "Payee" field, so I initially thought this feature wouldn't be useful for me.
However, I considered duplicating the column that contains relevant information (such as the transaction description) and mapping it both to the "Payee" and "Notes" fields during import.

For example, my bank only provides transaction details like this:

Pag. del 26/02/20 ora 13:12 presso: SUPERMERCATO CONAD SUP VIA APPIA KM. 18 SNC XXXXXXXX NFRITA Carta N° ******** Nessuna Commissione

If I duplicate this column and use "Pattern match Payees", could MMEX correctly extract the payee name using regex?
The problem is that if I don't assign a specific field as "Payee" during import, these two options ("Pattern match Payees" and "Add match details to Notes") are not even activated!

Is there a workaround for this? Maybe a way to trick MMEX into allowing the feature even without a dedicated payee field from the bank?

Thanks for any help!