unofficial microsoft.public.money FAQ and A
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How to do things in Money

Q) How do I categorize multiple items all deposited at once? What about several paychecks?

A) For things besides paychecks, the category part is easy. You use the split. But the tougher part is if you want to list all of the payees. A Money transaction allows one Payee, no matter how many splits. This makes it hard to list ten payees for ten checks in one split transaction.

Some choices:

1a) Ignore the payees and put all the deposited items in one split transaction.
1b) Put the payees in the memo(s) and make the Payee something like (various).

2) "Deposit" all the checks in separate transactions to some Money account that is not the real-world Bank account. If you have a pocket change account, for instance, this is a good place to do it. Then do a single transfer of the total amount to the actual Money account where these are deposited.

3) Ignore the fact that you deposited them in one deposit and create multiple Money transactions. This makes it slightly more difficult to reconcile vs. the bank statement since you have to remember that all of these small deposits in Money add up to that large deposit on the statement.

Re. #1, since a Money Paycheck is a special type of split, if one of the items deposited is a paycheck and you do full accounting in a Paycheck transaction, adding other checks to this deposits probably causes more confusion than it is worth. But you could do it. Just add them to the after tax tab. You can combine multiple paychecks in one paycheck transaction, but there are various reasons you probably don’t want to do this: First, it will be hard to reconcile all of the paycheck information from your stubs with one paycheck transaction. Second, the Money Tax Estimator assigns meaning to the first entry on the wages tab--this is the amount from which the “Before Tax” amounts are deducted--and you should watch Tax Estimator very carefully to make sure its results are sane if you are trying to combine paychecks into one transaction.

#3 causes grief for those who download transaction data.

Please see this disclaimer if you are using Money 2005 or this comment if you are using Money 2006.

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