I'm trying to import several years (4) worth of multiple Checking and Savings accounts in an effort to do some predictive budgeting. I think I understand that Categories are simply indicators of which Accounts the Expense transactions should be charged against.. but maybe I'm thinking wrong? I have all of my transaction data in spreadsheets and have been working to adjust the Categories and Sub-Categories to be consistent both among the banks data as well as to the Accounts I've set up in KMyMoney so maybe that's what is clouding my thinking, lol.

I have set up Accounts for 2 Checking, 2 Savings, and 3 Credit Cards but I'm not sure how to categorize the transactions to ensure that the correct Accounts get posted.
I have Asset Accounts set up for each Checking, Savings Acct. by Name as items directly under the Asset item, and each credit card by name under "Credit Cards" which is directly under Liability.

There are a couple of Category classifications that I just can't get my head around:

• Transfers between Savings accounts & Checking .. Do I categorize them as "Transfer:Checking1", "Transfer:Savings1", etc.?
• Payments to the 3 Named Credit Card Accounts .. Do I categorize as "Credit Cards:Card1", etc?

and is this hierarchy correct for the corresponding Expense accounts/categories:

• For Transfers I have expense items named Savings, Savings1, Checking, etc. (Should I have a "Transfer" item for each bank account under Expense?
  (i.e. now the category is just the name of the other account that is being debited or credited)
• Expense > Credit Cards > Card1, Card2, Card3 (where Credit Cards is child of Liability and the Cards1,2,3 are children of Credit Cards)

Sorry if this is a basic/silly question, but I've been pounding on the data and trying various imports for so long now that my head is swimming.

Did you have a chance to read the chapter on Basic Accounting in the KMyMoney manual? If not, please do so. Then you probably understand that a transfer from a checking account to the credit card is not an expense but a simple transfer of the beans from the checking account to the credit card account. To enter such a transaction open the ledger of the checkings account and select the credit card liability account as the 'category' and you're set. If you still have questions, please let us know. We'll get you going.

ipwizard wrote:Did you have a chance to read the chapter on Basic Accounting in the KMyMoney manual? If not, please do so. Then you probably understand that a transfer from a checking account to the credit card is not an expense but a simple transfer of the beans from the checking account to the credit card account. To enter such a transaction open the ledger of the checkings account and select the credit card liability account as the 'category' and you're set. If you still have questions, please let us know. We'll get you going.

Thanks for your quick reply. Yes, I did read that and for the credit cards I suppose I just wanted to confirm that If the Liability name was Credit Cards > Card1, etc, that the correct checking transaction category would indeed be Credit Cards:Card1, etc. so thanks for confirming that.

As for transfers between checking and savings accounts, should the transaction categories be simply "Checking", "Savings", etc, or rather "Asset:Checking", "Asset:Savings", etc.? Or do I need to allocate them manually from the ledgers after import?

By the way, I should have made it more clear that these questions were more about how to categorize in the combined account data import files, prior to importing to better set up and match my newly created & empty accounts in KMyMoney.

Thanks for your patience with me on this.

jimdavis wrote:Thanks for your patience with me on this.

You're welcome.

I think we should develop a couple of real example transactions so that you see how things can be accomplished. A few more questions though before we start: which file format are you trying to use for your import? Do you have to use it or could you use an alternative? A few things depend on this selection, that's why I am asking.

Unfortunately I need to use CSV because of the mix of older and newer records, and they are all in csv. My csv file headings are:
Date, Account Name, Check#, Transaction, Note, FullCategory, Parent Category, Category, Amount.
My spreadsheet formula for FullCategory simply concatenates the Parent Category and the Category to "Parent Category:Category" to give me some flexibility in mapping on imports. From the spreadsheet I export one csv file for each of my 4 bank accounts which I then import to KMyMoney.

I'm almost there, though. I've managed to import my Checking transactions and categories, and they seem to (mostly) post to the accounts I've set up!
The good/bad thing is that you must save periodically when experimenting, but mostly it's been good that I can "erase" a bad import by closing without saving, lol.

Now I'm having trouble with the savings, as I don't understand how to name (Payee/Description) or categorize (Category) the accounts to have the correct ones credited/debited on import.
To complicate matters there are a total of 4 accounts which may have "Transfer" transactions between them, plus "Cash" transactions (Withdrawals). If you could give an example I can hopefully take it from there.
To recap, my 4 bank Accts (under Assets) are Bank1 Checking, Bank2 Checking, Bank1 Savings, and Bank1 Savings2, plus I have a Cash Asset account. I'm OK in understanding that money OUT from the account will be a -(negative) amount and In (deposits/Transfers will be positive, so lets say that I am importing my CSV for Bank1 Savings and the transactions are-

• Transfer IN from Bank1 Checking
• Transfer OUT to Bank1 Checking
• Transfer IN from Bank1 Savings2
• Transfer OUT to Bank1 Savings2
• Income from interest
• Deposit from Cash
• Withdrawal to Cash

What is the "role" of Payee/Description vs. Category in those transactions, with regard to how the various Asset (as well as Expense) Accounts get posted?
Or in the above examples what keywords would you suggest in the columns for Payee/Description and Category?

Now that I've written all that out I'll probably eventually see my answer, but so far I guess I just haven't had enough coffee, so HELP! (and your confirmation) is welcome & appreciated!!.

Ok, I gave it a try here and constructed a sample kmy and csv file plus a description. I left those on my cloud server because I can't attach them here.

I also tried to do the import of transfers between two accounts and noticed, that the CSV importer has a problem with them It takes the category and creates an expense/income category where it should use the existing asset/liability account. This is probably what is confusing you.

Here's how I would fix this:

1. Import as before using the category column for the second account name (e.g. CheckingsB)
2. Rename the category named with the account name (e.g. CheckingsB) to some unique name that does not show up elsewhere (e.g. JD-RENAME)
3. Open the ledger of the imported account (e.g. Checking A)
4. Use the filter at the top and enter JD-RENAME (only the transaction in question are shown)
5. Press Ctrl+A to select all of them
6. Press the Edit button
7. Select the asset account CheckingsB in the category drop down. Don't change anything else
8. Press the Enter button
9. The JD-RENAME category should now have no transactions assigned. Delete it.

Repeat this for all your accounts. Watch out for duplicates as a transfer from A to B shows up in both A and B and might be imported twice. Delete one of them manually. I understand that this is a bit of work, but CSV is not the best format to do such a historical import.

Hope that helps.

ipwizard wrote:Ok, I gave it a try here and constructed a sample kmy and csv file plus a description. I left those on my cloud server because I can't attach them here.

I also tried to do the import of transfers between two accounts and noticed, that the CSV importer has a problem with them It takes the category and creates an expense/income category where it should use the existing asset/liability account. This is probably what is confusing you.

Here's how I would fix this:

1. Import as before using the category column for the second account name (e.g. CheckingsB)
2. Rename the category named with the account name (e.g. CheckingsB) to some unique name that does not show up elsewhere (e.g. JD-RENAME)
3. Open the ledger of the imported account (e.g. Checking A)
4. Use the filter at the top and enter JD-RENAME (only the transaction in question are shown)
5. Press Ctrl+A to select all of them
6. Press the Edit button
7. Select the asset account CheckingsB in the category drop down. Don't change anything else
8. Press the Enter button
9. The JD-RENAME category should now have no transactions assigned. Delete it.

Repeat this for all your accounts. Watch out for duplicates as a transfer from A to B shows up in both A and B and might be imported twice. Delete one of them manually. I understand that this is a bit of work, but CSV is not the best format to do such a historical import.

Hope that helps.

Wow! Thank You so much!
Glad that this lead you (and me) to find the "import quirk", because YES, that was indeed making me scratch my head and second-guessing my grasp of what little I thought I knew about accounting!

Thanks again, and just so you know KMyMoney has the best CSV import method and functionality that I have run across so far in my effort to do this. Kudos to you and everyone.

Glad that we were able to sort this out. I added Bug #405293 to make sure we will eventually fix the problem.

ipwizard wrote:Glad that we were able to sort this out. I added Bug #405293 to make sure we will eventually fix the problem.

Thanks Thomas. I registered on the Bugtracker site so I could add that here in the U.S. my two Banks ("Credit Union" Banks) both offer a "Money Management" system where the ONLY transaction download option is CSV format or PDF format for monthly statements.

Thank you again for your valuable help with this.

I've managed to import all of my account data histories and can move forward from here, so Thanks again.

However, I feel like I'm still missing something easier in regard to the Transfer transactions. Is it possible to have the accounts credit/debit themselves using only the "Payee/Description" field?

For example, in the debited account (from account) if the "Payee/Description" field said "Transfer" plus the name of the account being transferred to, and the credited account (to account) "Payee/Description" field said "Transfer", is something like that a built-in function? Or, is using the Category and method that you suggested the only method?

I don't have a OFX file to examine because both of my banks only export csv.

To help us out here, can you please create two (one for each account) sample CSV files as how they would be sent by your bank and attach them to the Bug #405293? Or would those two transactions (one for each account) show up in the same CSV file? To get this working the above mentioned bug needs to be fixed and then it seems to be a matter between the importer and transaction matcher to solve this in a somewhat automated fashion.

ipwizard wrote:To help us out here, can you please create two (one for each account) sample CSV files as how they would be sent by your bank and attach them to the Bug #405293? Or would those two transactions (one for each account) show up in the same CSV file? To get this working the above mentioned bug needs to be fixed and then it seems to be a matter between the importer and transaction matcher to solve this in a somewhat automated fashion.

I have uploaded 3 csv sample outputs, one for each bank, plus the 3rd is from one bank that is externally linked to the other bank and includes the combined (checking only) transactions.

At first I had tried to import ALL transactions from the two banks (4 accounts in total: BankA checking, BankB checking, BankB savings, BankB savings2) but that was a failure so I now have 4 import files, one for each account. Each account will obviously show each transfer as either a debit or credit, and this is what I thought should somehow get automated. Perhaps I'm wrong.

What exactly triggers the correct asset account allocation for a debit or credit in a transaction line? The Payee/Description field, or the Category field? Or is the only debit/credit allocation made on the asset account that the import is for (selected at the end of the import)?

<edit> It would also help if the CSV Account Wizard asked for and used an Account Name field rather than not finding a name and showing the selection drop down at the end of import.

Thomas,
I think I've answered my question: The account allocations should normally be triggered by the Category, but in the case of these Asset transfers they are not due to the 'bug' in the importer. Is that correct?

And I see that these transfers create Payees based upon the Payee/Description field, so I have made each payee the name of the (transfer 'target') accounts so I'm OK (happy?) with that as well.

In my case, my solution (based on your suggestion) is to categorize these transfers as "Transfer:[Asset Acct Name]" which then creates multiple Income>Transfer>[Asset Acct Name] accounts, which I then filter on and edit from the imported Account's Ledger as you described. Do you see the need for me to delete these accounts once they are empty? I can envision that they would be handy to keep for future transfers.

I now see that you have a Report for Transfers, so I suppose it would be nice for the CSVImporter to use the built-in "transfer" designation if it runs across a "Transfer" category on Import? Other than that and my suggestion that the Importer recognize a column called "Account Name", I'm a happy camper.

Many Thanks for your help & patience!