Hi,

I've been developing YetAnotherDoubleEntryFinancialManager thingie for tracking my finances, and my wife reminded me: don't reinvent the wheel. See whether what's out there will work for us.

So, one feature I'd like to have, that I haven't seen much existing software take into account:

There's a very real difference between the day I buy something (purchase date) and the day the transaction clears at the bank. Frequently, purchases I make on the weekend clear at the bank on the following Tuesday or Wednesday. If one were interested in studying their own buying habits, which I am, you'd want to know the purchase date. If one wanted to predict the likelihood of having a certain amount of money in the account by a certain day, knowing statistics comparing a transaction's purchase date and the date it clears the account would be important. Receipts show one, but not the other. Bank records vary, depending on the type of account - my credit card account shows both, my checking does not.

Would KMyMoney be interested in adding another field to the transaction record to indicate purchase date?

Thanks,

riddochc wrote:I've been developing YetAnotherDoubleEntryFinancialManager thingie for tracking my finances, and my wife reminded me: don't reinvent the wheel. See whether what's out there will work for us.

Very wise approach.

riddochc wrote:Would KMyMoney be interested in adding another field to the transaction record to indicate purchase date?

There is already a (mostly hidden) field called entry date which is filled when you first enter a transaction. I am not sure if it is used other than sorting the ledger contents. At least, I cannot remember seeing it used in forecasting or reporting code. I have to admit, that I am not an expert on those areas of code/functionality.

The field is not available on the UI and therefore the contents cannot be modified.

What do others think about this feature? The discussion is open.

ipwizard wrote:There is already a (mostly hidden) field called entry date which is filled when you first enter a transaction. I am not sure if it is used other than sorting the ledger contents. At least, I cannot remember seeing it used in forecasting or reporting code. I have to admit, that I am not an expert on those areas of code/functionality.

The field is not available on the UI and therefore the contents cannot be modified.

Hmm. I think introducing an additional field would be better than co-opting an existing field, for this purpose. It's reasonable to think that a person might not enter their receipts into their computer every single day, and might occasionally miss a day or two.

I just pulled the git repository last night, and built the current code... I'd be willing to help scratch this itch and contribute some code to do this myself, independent of how many other people think it'd be useful. (Hey, it could be a lot easier than writing my own financial manager, anyway.) It would be cool if someone beats me to it -- I'm not familiar with the codebase of KMyMoney yet -- but since I want this feature, I'm suitably motivated to implement it.

I think that introducing a new field might be better. As far as I can tell, the entry date is not used in reports or forecasting, but an additional field would not hurt anyone and it would prevent further confusions.

Hei Ku wrote:I think that introducing a new field might be better. As far as I can tell, the entry date is not used in reports or forecasting, but an additional field would not hurt anyone and it would prevent further confusions.

Ooops, some misunderstanding here: I did not mean to re-use the the entry date field for this feature but wanted to give some information about the current state of affairs.

A new field is definitely needed for this.[hr]

riddochc wrote:I just pulled the git repository last night, and built the current code... I'd be willing to help scratch this itch and contribute some code to do this myself, independent of how many other people think it'd be useful. (Hey, it could be a lot easier than writing my own financial manager, anyway.) It would be cool if someone beats me to it -- I'm not familiar with the codebase of KMyMoney yet -- but since I want this feature, I'm suitably motivated to implement it.

New developers are always welcome. Patches as well

Make sure to subscribe to the developer mailing list at http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/list ... -developer as this is the main hangout and communication channel among devs. We can certainly guide you and support your effort.

I'm not sure how easy it would be to manage these extra fields in practice. OK so I purchase something on Saturday which does not appear in my account until Monday which is the day the money appears to leave my account BUT if I pay a cheque in through my ATM on Saturday, it is credited for interest purposes as a Saturday deposit, it appears in my account on Monday but it is not normally cleared until Thursday. I know one bank where deposits are immediately available; they take the risk that it will not clear while others will not allow drawings on an uncleared cheque. If I go on the Internet every two or three days I could work out what dates things had been cleared but that information is not normally on my written or online statements.

IMHO, it should be an optional feature, because the policies on that probably vary a lot from country to country. And it is an extra hassle that you don't always want to go through unless it is really worth it to you.
In my case, I just enter the actual date of the transaction, and keep that in mind when reconciling, but I understand how it could be of use to other users.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/data?pid= ... -H,PR013-H,

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Cheers

Hei Ku wrote:IMHO, it should be an optional feature, because the policies on that probably vary a lot from country to country. And it is an extra hassle that you don't always want to go through unless it is really worth it to you.
In my case, I just enter the actual date of the transaction, and keep that in mind when reconciling, but I understand how it could be of use to other users.

I agree with both of you, on this. Yes, this information might not be of interest to everyone. It might also be difficult to manage, depending on how things work for you.

Nobody should be required to use this feature. I intend for it to be an optional field, preferably in such a way that if you haven't gone through the trouble of enabling it, you'd never know (or need to know) that it's there.

I've always faced this issue, but some how managed to go around it... If you go to Settings > Register > Sorting, you can play around with both Entry date and Post date. But this is applied globally across all banks or accounts.

I have one particularly obnoxious bank, which doesn't provide the "Transaction date" online and sometimes I've had the post date after a week of transaction. What happens then is the order of the enlisted transactions are messed up (for a given day they are neither alphabetical nor sorted by charge). They don't provide a cumulative balance either. This make cross-checking / verifying the transactions across the bank's online list and KMM's ledger a difficult task.

riddochc wrote:I agree with both of you, on this. Yes, this information might not be of interest to everyone. It might also be difficult to manage, depending on how things work for you.

Nobody should be required to use this feature. I intend for it to be an optional field, preferably in such a way that if you haven't gone through the trouble of enabling it, you'd never know (or need to know) that it's there.

Moreover since this behavior differs from bank to bank, it should be customizable for each bank or account. Each account should have its own ledger sorting rule.

I just had an idea which might be better implemented in KDE 4. If you've used the comic reader plasmoid, then you'll see small left/right arrows on mouse hover to read the previous or next day's strip. Similarly, here we could have up/down arrow to manually push a record up/down the ledger display. For KDE 3, this up/down arrow can be provided below the ledger pane (beside New, Delete, Edit, Enter,....)...

kap4lin wrote:Moreover since this behavior differs from bank to bank, it should be customizable for each bank or account. Each account should have its own ledger sorting rule.

Use a right click on the header of the ledger view for the account in question and you have what you need/ask for. This is for KMyMoney 0.9.x

ipwizard wrote:

kap4lin wrote:Moreover since this behavior differs from bank to bank, it should be customizable for each bank or account. Each account should have its own ledger sorting rule.

Use a right click on the header of the ledger view for the account in question and you have what you need/ask for. This is for KMyMoney 0.9.x

So, the "default" rule is set the settings and here I can change that for each account - nice. Thanks.

This is my first message in this forum, so I hope I'm not wrong.

I have some remaks concerning the missing/new features in kmymoney 2 0.9.3 and the add of a database support.

First of all, I think it's a very good idea (it will speed up kmymoney and allow bigger files ...)

But, in the release notes you speak about differents databases :

1- Have considered the fact, it is very hard to maintain. (see the pb that the amaroK developpers encountered).
2- Not everybody is able to configure a mysql server (or postgrepsql)
3- why not use a thing like mysql-embedded wich requires no skill from the user ?
4- to me, it seems very important to have only one thing to maintain but the possibility to import/exprot very easily and quickly ...

I hope this suggestion are ok

The rather new update all accounts option is really nice, could it be improved even further?
Used current cvs and the hbci plugin from february 25th, when i update several accounts, it will ask for each account, for which time frame data should be downloaded, and open one report window for each. Couldn't it just ask once?

even better would be i guess, if it could run like every 10 minutes in the background. Not necessary, but it would be a cool feature

Also nice would be an import from online account wizard, get all the data, add the appropriate opening balance, and what information hbci gives.

Exilant wrote:The rather new update all accounts option is really nice, could it be improved even further?
Used current cvs and the hbci plugin from february 25th, when i update several accounts, it will ask for each account, for which time frame data should be downloaded, and open one report window for each. Couldn't it just ask once?

You can twist the time frame question by modifying the account details (there's a tab once mapped to an AqBanking account which has that data). This requires KMyMoney 0.9.3 and KBanking 0.9.10, but your version should have it too. The report window is controlled via AqBanking and we don't have access to it. I was looking for a way to close it automatically if no errors happened, but I gave up. The code is just too complex for my eyes.

Exilant wrote:even better would be i guess, if it could run like every 10 minutes in the background. Not necessary, but it would be a cool feature

Also nice would be an import from online account wizard, get all the data, add the appropriate opening balance, and what information hbci gives.

Don't know about the automatic feature. It might become tricky in case the user is modifying a transaction and at the same time a download modifies it too while matching. I don't want to think about the consequences.

The addition to the wizard would require an addition to the AqBanking library which will then have to notify an application (it is currently used with at least three different ones) to create a new account and automatically map it. The wizard you talk about is part of AqBanking and KMyMoney doesn't even know about it's presence. A cool idea though which I will forward to the AqBanking developer.