#429 Feature to truncate payees for specified number of characters

[Sawiga Don]

Hello,

The ability to truncate payees to a specified character length before importing would save many hours of work so categories will be auto assigned to their respective payees. I understand remembering the category for each payee has been a feature since 0.3.0.2. We have been using Money Manager EX for nearly as long. The problem when importing our QIF files is that our bank, PayPal, and American Express all include additional information along with the payee, making each payee entry unique.

Here's an example of how some of my payees are imported now:
AMERICAN EXPRESS DES:ACH PMT ID:A0... CO ID:3133
AMERICAN EXPRESS DES:AXP DISCNT ID:1150... 1150131209 CO
AMERICAN EXPRESS DES:SETTLEMENT ID:115... INDN:EXRX 1

Since payees always include unique numbers, they never match past entries nd the category end up as 'unknown'. That is the greatest time drain going through each entry one by one, assigning a category it should already know if Money Manager had the ability to truncate all the unique characters that do not exactly match the payees already imported payee list. This would require the ability to specify how many characters would be included for each payee for future imports. Any payees with characters matching the specified truncated characters would be truncated itself as it is being imported.

The reason truncating a set amount of characters for every entry would not work is that the ones above, for example, would need to be truncated to 24 characters, whereas other payees where the unique characters begin much sooner would need to be truncated to a shorter character length before the unique characters would begin to appear.

This means you could select a button that would mark particular payees for future imports. Then you would be prompted to enter the number of characters that would appear for that payee whenever those initial letters matched, thereby allowing the proper category to populate automatically since the payees would now match no longer displaying their unique characters.

I see you already have a feature request (3148) that would allow you to categorize payees with varying names as the same so they are assigned the same category: https://github.com/moneymanagerex/moneymanagerex/issues/3148
Unfortunately it would take someone just as long to manually categorize them to the same payee as it would to simply assign them the correct category, which as mentioned take many hours when dealing with months of transactions.

Money Manager Ex is already outstanding, particularly since it is free. This would be a feature that would set it apart from the paid options and would save hours of tedious work.

Thanks :)