deleting subcategories
I've been using Moneydance for a very long time and my current file goes back to 2009. Originally I wanted to keep a lot of detail on money out and money in, as I needed to budget very carefully. Now that we are getting older and I'm trying to teach my husband how to use the database too, ease of entering data is becoming much more important to us than finely differentiating mini-categories for each expenditure. How can I eliminate subcategories and move all those transactions up a level, to the main category, without making a total mess of the system?
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1 Posted by dtd on 08 Feb, 2025 07:24 PM
Set all the subcategories to "Inactive" and they will still be there, but they won't show in the picklists and such.
Do you need to see the transactions at the top level (they are older, of course) - just enter new transactions without the subcategory, and if you ever need to see the old ones, you can go look at the inactive categories.
If you must have the older transactions moved up a category level - you can use Batch Change, but that's definitely "back everything up first!" territory as it is easy to get those mass changes wrong.
2 Posted by ceanothus on 08 Feb, 2025 08:45 PM
3 Posted by dtd on 08 Feb, 2025 08:57 PM
Your last message had no new content - you should go to
https://infinitekind.tenderapp.com/discussions/general-questions/186377-deleting-subcategories
to reply.
4 Posted by dwg on 08 Feb, 2025 10:08 PM
I wrote this note some time ago on amalgamating categories, as @dtd said backup before you start, if you make a mistake backup is likely to be your only way of retrieving the situation.
Amalgamating Categories
Before you start, take a backup of your data, this is a significant restructure and a mistake almost always results in the need to restore from Backup, mistakes are something you can rarely recover from when doing this.
Decide which of the categories you are going to keep, even if you plan on renaming it, that is easy to do, in due course. I would generally keep the category that has the most transactions it in.
You now need to open a transaction register for one of the categories you want to amalgamate with the one you are keeping. To do this use the menu item Tools → Categories.
Select the category you want to move the transactions from, Right click and select "Open in New Window" The result is a transaction register, now be careful here this is a category transaction register not the Account transaction register you are used to dealing with, yes they look the same but there are implications in changing things in this sort of register (Note about making sure you have a backup).
Select all transaction in this register, generally you can do this by selecting a transaction then using the keyboard shortcut <Ctrl>-A (<Cmd>-A on Mac).
Now right click on the transactions and Select Batch Change. Select to Change the ACCOUNT (yes that is Account – this is one of the differences when using category registers) In the window that comes up scroll and select the category that you want these transactions to be part of i.e. the Category you are going to be keeping.
Repeat the above process for any other categories.
If you wish to rename the category, from the category window select the category and choose the Edit button, in the dialog that comes up you can change the category name, and also change where it sits in the category structure (parent) if desired.
You should now have some empty categories these can be deleted.