How to improve statement aliasing in Microsoft Money

When statements are downloaded from your bank or financial institution, Microsoft Money uses an algorithm to attempt to match the transactions against existing entries in your account register or in the scheduled bills and deposits list.

Sometimes, what is actually matched is completely the wrong transaction, and then Money remembers that match. So, next time, a transaction is downloaded and matched against the same incorrect payee.

Fortunately, you can have some control over stopping erroneous matches in future, by removing the incorrect details that have been remembered in the past. To do this, click Accounts and Bills -> Categories and Payees -> Payees -> Preferred Payee Names (or in Money 2005, Banking -> Account Tools -> Categories and Payees -> Preferred Payee Names). This will show you how the downloaded names are matched against payees. You can delete the ones which are wrong.

In addition, you can go to the Payee Rules Manager. In this section, you can put in some generic words that can be ignored from the payee field. This manager doesn't have wildcard support, which can be a bit of a problem, especially if your financial institution puts in sequential alphanumeric codes, for instance.

You can help yourself also by turning on the Money option to show standardized payee names (found in the tools->options or settings -> online services place). This option removes all numbers and punctuation before trying to find a match. This would make, 'Tesco 1234', for example, become 'Tesco'.