Kmymoney; KmyMoney 4.6.2 KDE 4.8.4

I have used KmyMoney for a number of years. There follows below details of some of its features or not features that annoy me.

The principle bones of contention are really focussed on Investments, the normal day to day ledger entries are fine.

First a little bit about me and what I am trying to do. 75 years old – let that be an awful warning.
Virtually computer illiterate, but trying – that is endeavouring as opposed to annoying!
Diligently records all transactions. This, broadly speaking, involves recording the dissipation of two pensions and managing a portfolio of Shares quoted on the London Stock Exchange from which the dividends enhance my pensions

Securities:

Why does Kmymoney apparently ignore the normal 'base units' of the Stock Exchange?
If I go to the London Stock Market and buy 391 shares at 1393.05p an entry in the Shares Ledger will say 3.91 shares at £1,393.05. Why can it not tell the truth?

Accounts:

Some accounts are empty - no money but have a history of entries.
The handbook implies that until you delete the entries you cannot close the account – fair comment.
I do not want to close the account I want to keep its records and put it into an 'archive' from which I may retreive it.
I closed a cheque account in 2005, changed my bank, its closing entry shows a zero balance but apparently I have to keep it or throw away the records.

I have an account called Shares. It is an Investment account.
This account records things like Buying and Selling Shares recording Dividends etc.
The column on the extreme right of the display is headed Balance – what is it a balance of?
One day I sold some shares the balance shows zero.
The next day I bought some shares the balance shown is the same number as the quantity purchased.
The following day I purchased some other shares and the balance shown is again the same as the number shown for quantity purchased.
The next week I received a dividend of £189.56 that was transferred directly to a savings account. The balance now shows £54.16.
A week later I receive a dividend of £320.21 that was transferred to a savings account. The balance now shows £17.79. What does it mean?

Stock Price Updates:

I have added 'On Line Price Update' to the task bar.
The icon for this operation looks as though it has come out from under a stone and it does not work.
The function works well from the 'Tools'.

Records:

The last feature which mystifies me are the files/backup files. The folder holding my backupfiles has 139Mb of records. The 'savedfile', from which the programme is started has only 206Kb.

In my 'backup' records some have names starting – backup, some have names kmymoney-2012-10-01.kmy, some have names like 'myname-2007-05-20-2007-11-01.kmy and others have names of the form “ money or backup-2010-12-01-2011-01-31-2011-06-05-2011-06-07-2011-06-09-2011-06-13-2011-06-16-2011-08-18-2011-11-11.kmy”.
Bear in mind that the folder has been in use for a number of years.
What form should your backupfolder have in both size and shape.
Surely if your backup record is valid you only need one of them – so why have I collected 139Mb of them?

Miser's Lament:

Each week I like to see how my shares are doing. It would be nice if somewhere the change in the value of the portfolio could be shown. The difference in value at the beginning and the end of the exercise. Say an entry on the Stock Update Prices form.


martin welsh

Martin,

Concerning your UK investment, probably you did not properly define the quote multiplier. Check this manual page, especially the last paragraph: http://kmymoney2.sourceforge.net/online-manual/details.investments.securities.html#details.investments.newinvestmentwizard

Concerning account closure, you probably want to delete the account, which indeed requires all entries to be removed. If I remember correctly, deleting an account is not that easy, because there may be dependencies in other accounts. You can also just close the account and select the setting "Don't show closed accounts" ("Filter" Tab in the General parameters of the KMyMoney configuraton menu).

The "Balance" column in an investment account shows the number of shares you currently hold taking into account the current transaction. The balance corresponding to the last transaction for a share is the same number you will see in the Accounts window under that account. For your example, on the first day you must have sold all your shares, because the balance became zero. The payment of a dividend does not change the balance, unless the dividend is being reinvested. Do not confound with the associated brokerage account. There, the balance is the amount of cash, and a dividend payment will increase the balance.

Concerning the toolbar, I agree the Online Price Update does not work. I am using "Update Stock and Currency Prices" instead. The default icon is an empty document with the bottom right corner folded. Rather boring indeed, but the icon does work.

I cannot comment on the backups, as I am not using this feature. I do regular file system backups instead.

Concerning your "lament", you cannot graph the value of an investment account over time. At least I would not know how. I suppose it is too complex to compute. I use the "Investment Performance by Account" report all the time. It is extremely versatile to configure, and you can see the starting and ending balance for the period selected. You can also export the data and put it in a spreadsheet, which is a very handy feature. The only problem is that it is a bit slow, and may loop indefinitely if you make a mistake when defining the start date, e.g. typing the year "12" instead of "2012".

I hope that helps.

If a penny share is bought for one penny what "degree of precision" should be applied so that the entry describing its purchase produces a coherent answer?

I find that in order to buy 27,010 shares for £1.11 it is necessary to enter 270.10 shares at a price of £111.00 to get the Shares Ledger to produce rational figures.

You confirm what I had feared regarding the closure of accounts. There does not appear to be a mechanism for archiving unused accounts without erasure. Sad.

A similar thing arises with Stocks and Shares you cannot archive share transactions and you finish up with a load of dead wood in your accounts.
This has been brought about because I have amalgamated my wife's account with mine in joint ownership so now we have three entries!

Your statement that after a share purchase the balance shown in the 'Shares' account is the number of shares you have purchased. After I have bought '270.1' shares it shows a balance of 270.10. The next entry is a dividend of £363.99 which changes the balance to 110.30 taken to the savings account - what does that mean?

We look forward to the next issue of the software rectifying the icons in the toolbar hiding their lights under bushels!

The monster file I am referring to is the accumulated 'Back Ups' that I have accumulated.

All that the lamenting miser is seeking is when you press the Update button you are presented with a figure that shows the net change in the total after the update.

The reason for this monster whinge about this excellent programme is that after using it for some time it gets cluttered with historical rubbish and the only way that I can see to tidy it up is to start again.

Thank you for replying, eventually I will start again and I will let you know when I do so.


martin welsh

If a penny share is bought for one penny what "degree of precision" should be applied so that the entry describing its purchase produces a coherent answer?

It's not the degree of precision. Since it does not look like anybody else has any idea, could you try to open a new database, create an investment and a savings account just like in your other database, and try to enter the transactions you are describing above? If you can reproduce the funny behavior on this small scale, it would be much easier to understand what is going on. If you cannot, then it is just a matter of finding out what is different between the two databases.

Regarding penny shares: please check the last sentence on this manual page regarding the factor setting. Hope that helps.

Will reply to you both tomorrow.

Thanks for the suggestions.

martin welsh

The handbook instruction for degree of precision states;

Fraction. The degree of precision to which your holdings are measured. For example, in the US most mutual funds measure holdings to three decimal places, so you would enter 1000 in this field. Stocks are often measured to only whole units, so you could enter 1 for a stock like this.

On the London Stock Exchange, based on penny stocks, I have elected to determine the precision to two decimal places.
1/100.
Using this i entered;
Fraction 1/100 – London Stock Exchange based on pence to two decimal spaces.
London Stock Exchange not shown so used Eurex.
GBP
Price per Share.

Buy shares.
Murray International
3156 shares
Price per share 906.18p
Expenses 80p

Total Expense shown £2,859,904.88

They did not cost me that much!
So where have I gone wrong - what degree of precision should I have used and why?


martin welsh

I think I understand your problem - a matter of reading entries on the forum over and over again. Am I right in the assumption that you want to manually enter transactions in the ledger view for investments and while doing this, use Pence as the currency unit? You enter 1309.24p and the application makes that 1309.24£ instead of the expected 13.0924£.

Hmm, one way out of this would be to enter exactly that: 13.0924£ for the price of a share. This would probably require to set the fraction to 1/10000.
In case you want to enter the penny based amount, you will have to setup British Pence as an additional currency, enter a fixed conversion rate to GBP of 100 and use British Penny as the trading currency for the investment. That would probably do. I have not tried it myself and don't have the time to do so.

Don't ask me about any side-effects this may cause in case you start using online updates or already do so.

The factor field I mentioned in my earlier post is only useful for online prices that are provided in Pennies when the trading currency is Pounds. It will not affect the behavior of the application when entering transactions manually. Sorry, if this might have caused any confusion.

I feel that you have come to the same decision that I have - it is not possible to make an entry which produces reasonable ledger entries using real world components like pennies. The programme has been in this state since its inception fiddle factors appear to be a necessity.

Thank you for trying.


martin welsh

I elected to rebuild the accounts entering what exists now. The old Backup Folder is now in archive.
So we have five accounts and a credit card.
One of the accounts, Shares, is built as an asset account and its principle use is the transfer of Dividend income to a Savings account and the purchase and sale of shares.
The Share Account had Shares Added. The precision used was 1:1 and for shares in the London Stock Market this produced coherent entries:
2913 shares @ £6.5987 has a value of £19,222.01.
Off line updates using Yahoo.com demanded a factor of 0.01 to get the right answer.
Off line updates from the London Stock Exchange from ft.com did not work.

As far as I can yet establish the size of the backup folder is because you add a file whenever you backup. 300 backups a year equals 300 files.
On the principle that the last one added is a fair copy perhaps it would be better called a history file.

What changes would I like to see?
In the Share account the boxes in which you enter Activity(Buy, Sell, Dividends etc) is far too large.
All the box sizes should be commensurate with the size of the entry.
I do not think that "Fraction. The degree of precision to which your holdings are measured." is quite the right wording. I certainly misconstrued it. I think that it is probable that putting the details of the actual transaction will usually work - that is paid 'x' for 'y' shares total cost 'z' £s or $s or whatever.
And that is about it we are all set for another 10years. Thanks to all who have subscribed to the programme and the Forum,


martin welsh