I've posted this above, but I got no replies... This is a killer
bug that makes the budget feature almost useless for anyone who uses
recurring bills, and it's been in the product for years. I've given
you an easy procedure to recreate it, and a workaround. I've spent a
lot of time on this, and I'd appreciate an MVP acknowledging that this
has been passed to Microsoft from someone they'll listen to.
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> From what I've read, the "Bills and Deposits" feature has been broken
> for quite some time... most corruption problems that I've seen are the
> result of a buggy bill that has been deleted but is still showing up
> in a report/budget/balance/etc.
>
> What is the best workaround for this problem? I've been using Money
> since 97, but i've upgraded to 2004. I'm trying to use the budget
> feature for the first time, but now it's forcing me to budget for rent
> bills that are long since deleted. What's the best workaround?
>
> I've seen posts that go back years complaining about this problem. MS
> really ought to get to the bottom of it, and release a Money 2004
> patch to fix it.
> My suggestion: Simply add an option to *NOT* forceably include
> Bills&Deposits in the budget. If I could just set the spending limit
> manually, there wouldn't be a problem.
I think I've found a workaround that suits my needs, and a way to
prevent this in the future.
For the MS developers, the problem can be reproduced VERY easily. If
a Microsoft MVP could please reply, I'd appreciate it. It's a killer
bug that makes the budget feature almost useless for anyone who uses
recurring bills, and it's been in the product for years.
1. Create a new Money 2003 or 2004 file.
2. Create a new checking account
3. Create a new recurring bill for $50 in the "Bills: Electricity"
category
4. Enter a few instances into the ledger
5. Delete the Bill
6. Create a new budget, including the "Bills: Electricity" category.
7. Set the spending limit to "0".
8. Finish the budget, and you will see that you are being forced to
budget $50 for the phantom bill. Right clicking on the
"Over/under-budget" category gives you an "edit" option. The phatom
bill shows up here, but obviously, you can't edit it. Deleting all
instances of the bill in the ledger does not fix the problem.
It's clear that if you could choose to NOT automatically include
Bills&Deposits in the budget, that there would be no problem. To
prevent this from happening, you must disassociate your recurring
bills with your budget categories. The workaround is as follows:
1. Remove the category from every entry in Bills&Deposits.
2. In the Categories screen, create new categories called "Bad
Expense Categories" and "Bad Income Categories"
3. Move every category that has ever had an associated Bill or
Deposit into this category, as a subcategory. The phantom bills will
follow them into the trap.
4. Recreate the categories that you just moved, if necessary.
5. Create a new budget, including these "clean" new categories and
excluding everything in the "bad" categories.
6. When you enter an instance of a bill into your ledger, you can set
the category... Just don't just don't apply the change to the whole
series!
Voila! Problem solved. The only real problem is that now your
reports might be screwy for a couple of months, and the autobudget
won't have any historical data in the "cleaned" categories. In my
opinion, this is the only reasonable workaround... I'm not willing to
delete any data in my file. Not that Money deletes anything anyway...
I tried deleting every account in my 10MB file, and it grew to 11MB.
What's up with that? Might as well give me an undelete option to
search and destroy those phantom bills.