unofficial microsoft.public.money FAQ and A
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Issues: "Corruption"

Q) Can you tell me more about the remarkable new Nuke-the-Bills miracle repair method?

[Relevant to Money2007 (v.16) and up]

A) Money 2007 introduced a new File|Repair option, File|Repair Money File|Remove all Bills data. (Insiders have been referring to this as the Bills Be Gone method. That seems too polite for the impact it has; Nuke-the-Bills is our favorite term here at the umpmfaq.) This option has enabled dramatic improvements in performance and significant reductions in files size for some users. At least one user, the author, had serious "stability issues" (i.e., it crashed a lot) under M06 that have not been seen in M07; this may be related to fixes in M07 or it may be related to "corruption" in the file cleaned up by Nuke-the-Bills.

(Addition of this feature was, apparently, a pathetic admission that the developers of Money can't design the product such that it can keep the scheduled bills data sane all by itself. There have been reports in the newsgroup that the underlying issue is that every time a bill is created or edited a new database schema is created and unbounded accumulation of these schemas is what results in observed performance and stability problems. It is difficult to understand why the design must be this way or why accumulation of these schemas can’t be done in a way less debilitating to performance. Though we frequently edit bills, the total number of bill variations that remain relevant at any point in time does not grow continually for most users. So if the number of these underlying structures does grow continually, this seems like more of an internal garbage collection kind of problem than something that needs to be there for functions and features that are exposed to the user. But it is what it is and Microsoft seems unwilling or unable to fix it by anything better than Nuke-The-Bills.)

We do not know what, exactly, this does internally. At least one user tested whether the same effect could be achieved just be deleting, one-by-one, the scheduled bills from the Money user interface. That did not have the same effects, so we can reasonably conclude that Nuke-the-Bills deletes all manner of stuff that we just cannot see from the Money user interface. We also know, now that we’ve lived for a while with files that have had the bills nuked, that whatever nuking does is not permanent. Sooner or later you will be faced with deteriorating performance again and this whole ugly process will need to be re-done. We could have hoped that Microsoft would re-design whatever internals can't seem to keep the bills data sane by themselves before we got to this point, but that no longer seems possible.

So, if you are experiencing performance or stability "issues" this may be a "silver bullet". But it's not for everybody and it's not something you should undertake lightly.

Why not?

You will have to re-enter ALL of your scheduled bills data. You will have to go in and fix your Advanced Budget. Lifetime Planner, which may depend on Advanced Budget if you set it up to do so, will likely be wrong until you get your Advanced Budget sorted out. Further, Lifetime Planner will need to have income re-associated with scheduled paychecks if you had it use them to define your income. All the historic entries on your Bill Calendar will be lost as well. Finally, you will have to delete all scheduled Apays and re-create them.

Still psyched?

Make a copy of your Money data file. Be sure it's a good copy. You might even want to save an additional copy (or copies) to a CD or flash drive, just in case.

When you select the menu option, Money will display a dialog box explaining the process. It recommends printing a Scheduled Bills report as the path to recover your bills after they are nuked. This is better than no advice at all, but beware that many details associated with scheduled bills are not displayed in this report. Examples of things you will need to re-create that are not included in the report are settings for things like estimate varies, number remaining, and paycheck tab assignment. Any "Buy Investment/CD" transaction does not print out the investment involved. Also, any edited occurrences beyond the next are not reported and, if the next occurrence has been edited, the basic series information is not reported.

The best "better" choice is to have two computers, networked and capable of running Remote Desktop, one with the original file and the other with the file being repaired. Then you can have one file open in a remote desktop window and the other file open on the local desktop and can copy all your bills data from the pre-repair file to the repaired file, one bill at a time. The reason for using Remote Desktop is that Money will not allow two instances to run simultaneously on a given machine. (Or at least for a given user; not sure I've ever tested the different simultaneous users case. Even if it worked, there's probably no way to copy from one user and past to another and the time it takes to "switch user" would prove prohibitive) You could probably have the second Money instance running in a VM. If you know of these things, you will understand; if not, it's probably not a good solution for you anyway.

You might also want to Export the "pre-nuke" Scheduled bills report to a file, .CSV or otherwise. You could then edit this file with Notepad or WordPad or even Excel to add the bills definition information the report doesn't otherwise print. After nuking the bills, you can then use this file as a reference to re-creating your bills. You can even copy/paste things like memos and payee names from the capture file back to the Money new scheduled item creation dialog.

Another way to aid the process is to systematically enter all your bills in registers before nuking them. You might want to put in a special memo or some such. After nuking the bills, you can then go through the registers and select the "bills" entries and r-click, Add to bills. After you've defined the new bill, you can delete the temporarily entered register transaction.

When you think you are done, you might want to consider cross-checking the before and after cash flow forecasts and scheduled bills reports to make sure you haven't missed anything.

Disclaimer: Because of the amount of work, the unknown prospect that it will prove worthwhile for any given file, the fact that it will deteriorate to where you started at some point in the future, and the serious prospect that, with less than very careful preparation and process, you could really make a mess of your data, the umpmfaq does not recommend Nuke-the-Bills. Any choice to go down this path is purely your own

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

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