Change of payee name

[Bob Williams]

Hi Thomas and Jack,

On 29/12/16 16:33, Jack wrote:
> On 2016.12.29 09:08, Thomas Baumgart wrote:
>> On Thursday 29 December 2016 11:48:45 Bob Williams wrote:
>>
>>> One of my payees has merged with another business, resulting in a new
>>> name. If I change the payee name in KMM, then all the historical
>>> transactions change payee. This is good behaviour, as spelling
>>> sometimes needs to corrected, but see my next question.
>> >
>>> Is there a way to create a new payee but somehow link it to an
>>> existing payee, so that new transactions appear with the new name,
>>> but earlier transactions are still associated with the old name?
>>
>> You can simply create a new payee using the payee view. Unfortunately,
>> your e- mail footer does not contain the KMyMoney version ;) but this
>> works for a long time.
>>
>> I am not sure if I understand your 'problem' which would only exist in
>> case the two payees have the same name. Otherwise, they are just two
>> separate payees. The old one keeps all the transactions assigned to
>> him/her, the new one will get the new transactions.
>>
>> It would get a bit tricky if you still receive online transactions
>> with the old name as payee information and want to map that to the new
>> payee. But that is also possible in KMyMoney.
>>
>> Maybe you can share an example or explain the setup a bit more.
> 
> I have had the same issue.  As just one example, my telephone company
> changed from AT&T to Frontier.  For the moment, lets ignore the issue of
> a few transactions where the billing name doesn't really match who I'm
> paying.  I will make a personal decision which name/payee to use for
> those.  The issue is that I seem to have two choices, and both have a
> down side.
> 
> 1) I simply change the name of the payee from AT&T to Frontier.  Now all
> my old and future phone bills show up under the same payee.  The problem
> is that (unless I also put the company name in the memo) there is no
> easy way to know which company a particular transaction actually went
> to.  I will say the many of my OFX imports do put the company name in
> the memo, but I have typically removed these, since in general (with the
> exception of this issue) I see no reason to have the same value in the
> payee and the memo.
> 
> 2) I create a new payee for Frontier.  Now I know which company was
> associated with each transaction, but I can't easily see all my phone
> bills under a single payee.  I can see them by looking at the
> appropriate category (assuming I have one for phone bills) but if I only
> use a category for all utility bills, there is no easy, sinlge place to
> just see all the phone bills.
> 
> So - whether someon can easily see all transactions for both companies
> at the same time (assuming he does create a new payee) is possible if
> they are all assigned to the same category.  It is also possible in a
> transaction report, but just selecting those two payees.  Another way
> would be to create a tag, and apply it to the appropriate transactions,
> but that would take a lot of manual work to set it up initially.
> 
> Bob - did I understand correctly, and do you have a better idea of your
> options?
> 
> Jack

Jack, you've described the problem exactly. I suppose using tags and/or
categories is the way to solve this, but it would work best if set up at
the beginning, before the problem arose, which requires a fully
functioning crystal ball.

My KMyMoney version is 4.8

Bob
-- 
Bob Williams
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