Toolkit-for-ynab: Feature Request: Strip MEMO fields on import (Chase puts garbage)

[jonathonbarton]

Chase in particular uses the Memo Field for "overflow" from the Payee Field, resulting in garbage Memo fields, i.e.
_COMENITY PAY SB WEB PYMT P12345678910111 WEB ID: 1234567891_
winds up with a Payee of
_COMENITY PAY SB WEB PYMT P123_
and a (useless) Memo of
_45678910111 WEB ID: 1234567891_

I'd love to be able to strip the Memo field on a per-account basis on import.

[Darunada]

Amex puts a long and unhelpful transaction number in the memo, and I've been thinking about this a while. +1 and as a stretch the ability to do something like a regex filter would be super cool.

[gap777]

I'm actually interested in seeing details on imported transactions... specifically, Amazon transactions are extremely difficult to correlate with spending for several reasons. Either way, more details are helpful. Are memo fields in YNAB populated with details from imported transactions? Are imported transaction details visible anywhere?

[joshmadewell]

Hey y'all, unfortunately, I'm going to have to declare this one as out of scope for the Toolkit. Importing is a background job that YNAB handles and isn't really something the Toolkit would do a great job of modifying. Sure we could try to detect that transactions _were_ imported and then update all of them to have no memo field but I think this is just going to cause more issues than it would solve.

I recommend a feature request to YNAB themselves to allow this option for imported transactions.

[hus115]

Any chance you'd reconsider. We all know how ynab is with fixing things....Everything is a wontfix for them.

But I think there is a way to handle this from the toolkit. When the transaction page is loaded look for any rows of transactions requiring approval (look for the inclusion of the approve button on that row). Within those rows set the memo field once to NULL.

Obviously I agree this would be better fixed by ynab because that would work no matter where you approve the transactions including on mobile apps but thats not realistic.

I considered using an API call to clean up the memo fields after the fact but distinguishing the difference between a garbage memo field that was imported and a real memo field added by the user would be to difficult, it has to be done before the user has a chance to customize the memo field which means a browser extension is the best option IMO.