# Using &kmymoney; for the first time

## Running &kmymoney; for the first time

Once &kmymoney; has fully loaded two windows will be opened. The top window, 'Tip of the Day' offers one of a series of important or useful pieces of information about the application. Tip of the Day Tip of the Day

You are recommended to quickly read through these tips by pressing on the Previous and Next buttons at the bottom of the window.

Once you have read the tips the window can be closed; it will re-open each time &kmymoney; is started. To stop this default behavior, uncheck the appropriate option on the Tip of the Day window.

Tips can be read at anytime by selecting Show tip of the day from the Help menu within &kmymoney;.

All tips have been extracted from the Frequently Asked Questions list (&FAQ;) that provides more detailed help and can be found on the project website and in this manual.

Please click on Close to close the Tip of the Day dialog.

When you run &kmymoney;, it might not look exactly like the screenshots in this manual. Many details, such as fonts, colors, and icons, can be customized, either using the Settings Configure &kmymoney;... dialog or the &kde; &systemsettings; application, depending on your operating system.

## The main window

The Main Window The Main Window

The &kmymoney; main window consists of four major parts

- A. The menu bar

- B. The toolbar

- C. The View selector

- D. The view

The menu and toolbars provide access to the features of &kmymoney; and allow you to Create files or configure how &kmymoney; operates.

On the left side of the main window, the view selector consists of at least eleven icons with optional labels, depending upon the software provided by your system. More icons could be added by various plugins. By clicking on an icon, the view window on the right hand side is loaded with the appropriate view of your financial data. Each view provides a unique representation of your financial situation and allows you to view or edit the information shown.

The view selector may contain the following icons

- Home View Home: A configurable overview of your current financial situation (or an introduction page when no data file is open).

- Institutions View Institutions: All of your institutions and accounts displayed in a hierarchy.

- Accounts View Accounts: All of your accounts displayed in a hierarchy.

- Schedules View Scheduled Transactions: Your recurring bills and deposits.

- Categories View Categories: Special accounts that provide a means for you to group associated transactions.

- Tags View Tags: Special accounts that provide an additional means to Categories for you to group associated transactions.

- Payees View Payees: All Payees used by &kmymoney;. These are all the people or organizations you pay money to or receive money from.

- Ledgers View Ledgers: Your account transactions.

- Investments View Investments: Your portfolio summary.

- Reports View Reports: A collection of useful reports, providing alternate, customizable views of your financial data.

- Budgets View Budgets: Your budgets

- Forecast View Forecast: This view provides a forecast of your accounts and categories

- Outbox View Outbox: Used by the online banking module to provide feedback on running processes. This view is provided by the KBanking plugin and may not be present on your system.

## Creating a new file

&kmymoney; keeps all the data about your finances in a file. As was stated in Defining the accounts (personal records), you can keep more than one set of accounts, but the data for each will be kept in a separate file, and &kmymoney; can only have one file open at a time. See the chapter on File Formats for more details about &kmymoney;'s data files.

To create a new file you can either select File New from the menu or choose the New icon from the toolbar. In addition, if the main welcome page is displayed, you can also select the first link: "Get started and setup accounts."

&kmymoney; will then open the New File Setup Wizard which will guide you through the process of creating the file.

Personal Data Page Personal Data Page

Since all fields are optional, you can use &kmymoney; without entering any information now. Any information entered here is used only to personalize your file. In the future, it may be used in some reports and for online banking. If &kmymoney; requires any personal information in future releases and finds none, you will be prompted to enter the relevant data then.

Please enter your name and address or nothing and press Next.

In case you have an address for yourself stored in the &kaddressbook;, the button Load from Addressbook is enabled and pressing it imports all information into &kmymoney;.

&kmymoney; supports multiple currencies. To set your base currency (the currency you use day to day and which will be used for your reports), select the appropriate entry from the list provided and press Next. A default will be selected from &kmymoney; based upon your locale settings.

In the following example, US Dollar has been selected as the base currency.

Base currency selection Page Base currency selection page

The following page allows you to create an initial account. For the typical &kmymoney; user this is a checking account.

Checking account creation Page Checking account creation page

Enter the name of the account and a possible account or reference number assigned by the institution managing the account. Enter the opening date of the account and the opening balance of the account. For example, you want to use &kmymoney; to manage all your finances as of 2008-01-01, then enter the balance of the account at the beginning of this date. The number can possibly be obtained from a paper statement. Also enter the name and routing number of the institution, though this information is optional and only required for online banking purposes.

In case you don't want to setup an initial account, please uncheck the check box.

Once finished, press Next to proceed.

Account template selection Page Account template selection page

Choose the appropriate country and account template(s). Each template provides a different set of categories for organizing your finances. Multiple templates, even from different countries, can be selected using a combination of &Ctrl; and &Shift; together with the &LMB;. The account hierarchy to be setup will be shown in a preview part of the wizard. In case you cannot find a template that suits your needs, don't select a template at this time, and you can manually set up categories later.

Once finished with the template selection press Next to proceed.

The next page of the wizard allows you to setup user preferences. If you select the checkbox, the application settings dialog will be displayed after you have completed the account setup wizard. Press Next if you are done and want to proceed.

Preference Page Preference page

The last page of the wizard allows you to select the location and filename that will be used to store your financial data. Initial values will be constructed out of your HOME folder and user name. In case the file exists, a warning will be displayed which reminds you to select a name of a non-existing file.

Filename selection Page Filename selection page

Now you have entered all relevant information to create the file. Press Finish and &kmymoney; will create the file for you and open it.

## Creating accounts

There are multiple ways you can create an account, which are described here:

Using the menu

- To create an account using the menu select Accounts New account.

Using the Accounts view

- To create an account using the accounts view click on the Accounts icon in the view selector to display the Accounts View. Right click on the either the Asset tree icon or the Liability tree icon in the right hand view and select New account from the popup menu. The Asset tree holds all of your accounts that are an asset, such as savings and investments. Liabilities are accounts that represent money you owe, such as loans and credit cards. These and all the other account types are discussed in more detail later in this manual.

Using the toolbar

- If the New Account... button is displayed on the toolbar, you can click it to create an account.

Note that &kmymoney; uses context menus a lot throughout the whole application. If you find yourself stuck trying to figure out how to do something, try right-clicking where you would expect to see a feature.

Creating a new account by either method opens the New Account Wizard. This wizard will take you step by step through the process of creating an account, gathering the required information at each step. To navigate through the pages click on the Next and Back buttons.

Create an account using any of the previously mentioned methods to continue. A full description of creating accounts can be found in the Accounts section.

Now that one or more accounts exist in &kmymoney;, your account summary is shown in the Home view. You can create transactions manually in the Ledgers view, or set up automatic transactions through the Schedules view.

## Schedules

Sometimes called a recurring transaction, a Schedule is a transaction that occurs one or more times over a certain period of time. A typical example is your pay check that you receive every month or week. Rather than have to enter the transaction details each time you get paid, you can instruct &kmymoney; to create a schedule that will enter a transaction for you when you get paid.

To maintain schedules click on the Schedules icon in the view selector.

## Categories

To maintain categories click on the Categories icon in the view selector.

A full description of this topic can be found in the Categories section.

## Tags

To maintain tags click on the Tags icon in the view selector.

A full description of this topic can be found in the Tags section.

## Payees

To maintain your list of payees click on the Payees icon in the view selector.

A full description of this topic can be found in the Payees section.

## Quicken Interchange Format (QIF) Import

If you currently use another financial manager application, &kmymoney; can import an account's transactions as long as they can be exported or saved in a format &kmymoney; understands. The most common of these is the Quicken Interchange Format (QIF). Most financial programs can export this format, although the different applications' methods of exporting QIF is not discussed here for brevity.

A full description of this topic can be found in the QIF Import section.

## Searching for transactions

&kmymoney; provides a useful and powerful transaction search facility in the form of the search dialog.

The search dialog can be opened from the toolbar using the Find icon or by selecting Find Transaction from the Edit menu.

A full description of this topic can be found in the Search section.

## Reconciliation

At some point you will want to reconcile the transactions you have entered with the transactions listed in a statement, be it a bank statement, credit card statement, loan statement, or any other statement. Reconciliation involves matching what you have entered with what the statement lists. If any discrepancies are found then either you or the person who created the statement have made a mistake.

To reconcile an account, first select the account, either from Accounts view or from Ledgers view. Then, either click on the Reconcile icon on the Toolbar, or select Reconcile from the Account menu.

A full description of this topic can be found in the Reconciliation section.

## Backing up

Now that you have created some accounts and entered transactions it's a good idea to perform a backup. Because the file used by &kmymoney; is a standard Unix file you can just copy the file to another location to back it up or use the dialog provided by &kmymoney;. Using the dialog is the preferred method because if &kmymoney; ever starts using other file formats, such as SQL, then it would be much harder to copy the file manually.

To backup your file through &kmymoney; Select Backup from the File menu and enter the folder where you wish the file to be saved. If the folder needs mounting first and you have the sufficient privileges then check the tick box labeled Mount this directory before backing up and click on OK.

The file will be saved to the folder specified with the current date appended to the filename so it is easy to see the date the file was backed up.

## Launching &kmymoney;

Most commonly, you will launch &kmymoney; from an icon or a start menu of your window manager. In this case, the default behavior is that &kmymoney; will open the last file you had open. However, in some circumstances, you will want or need to launch &kmymoney; from the command line.

For a complete description of all the available command line options, see the man page for &kmymoney;. However, there are two special cases which we describe here.

## `kmymoney -n`

The -n option tells &kmymoney; not to open the last file it had open. This can be useful if the program crashes on startup.

## `kmymoney <path to file>`

Giving &kmymoney; a filename on the command line tells it to open that file instead of the last file it had open. You can use the name of any valid &kmymoney; file, as described in the chapter on file formats. In addition, this can be used to import a GnuCash file.

## How to move &kmymoney; to a new computer

### Moving your data

If you get a new computer, it's very easy to move your data. In fact, all you have to do is to copy your &kmymoney; data file. The name of the file is shown in the title bar when &kmymoney; is running, it usually ends in .kmy. The first time you run the application on the new computer you will have to tell it where you have put the data file, either by running from the command line, or from the File Open... menu. You should even be able to move between &Windows;, &MacOS;, and &Linux; systems.

If you have encrypted your data file, be sure the appropriate software and keys have also been set up on the new computer.

If your data is in an SQL database, refer to documentation for your database software for guidance on migrating your data.

Note that this assumes you have installed the same version of &kmymoney; on the new computer as you were running on the old computer. Installing a newer version should also be safe, but you need to be aware of any issues related to that upgrade. Any such issues should be noted in the release notes for the new version.

### Moving your settings

If you only move your data file to the new machine, as described in the previous section, &kmymoney; will work correctly, but you will have lost any settings you changed from the default on your old machine. To maintain these settings, you also need to copy your configuration file. This file is called kmymoneyrc. This file will be in a directory with other &kde; application configuration files. On a &Linux; system, this will be in $KDEHOME/share/config where $KDEHOME is usually .config within your home directory. If you are migrating from a version of &kmymoney; prior to 5.0 to 5.0 or later, the old location of $KDEHOME was .kde4.

#### Moving plugin settings

If you have run any &kmymoney; plugin, such as the csv importer or exporter, it may also have created a configuration file in that same directory, such as csvimporterrc or csvexporterrc. These should also be copied to the new computer.

As with the main data file, this assumes the same version of the plugin on both computers. Upgrades are generally safe, but if the functionality of the plugin has changed greatly, it is advisable to carefully test using the old configuration file, to be sure the plugin behaves as you expect.

Note that when upgrading from a previous version to version 5.0 or higher, the location of the template files used by the plugin for printing checks has changed. Please consult the release notes or the project website for more details.

These instructions are solely for moving your &kmymoney; data and settings. However, there may be important items which are stored by &kde; and not by &kmymoney;, such as passwords stored in kwallet. Moving other parts of your &kde; setup is beyond the scope of this manual, although many of the relevant files are also stored under $KDEHOME.

## Contacting the Developers / Reporting Bugs

### Contacting the developers

For general questions or comments about &kmymoney;, there is a users' mailing list &userlist;. (more details here.) In addition, you can contact the developers through their mailing list &devlist;. (more details here.) Since replies are often sent only to the list, you may not get any response unless you subscribe to one of the lists before sending to it.

We're happy to hear about your experiences using &kmymoney;.

### Reporting bugs

To report a bug please use the interface provided by &kmymoney; by selecting Help Report Bug and filling in the required information. However, in case you have any difficulties with that method, you can report a bug (or file a wish-list or enhancement request) directly at the &kde; bug reporting web site. Reports should be filed against the product kmymoney.

In any case, before reporting a bug, please read through the guidelines below. Following them will make it more likely that the developers will be able to quickly identify the problem without having to ask you for more information.

#### Writing High Quality Bug Reports

We encourage users to take extra time to write high-quality bug reports when submitting them. This reduces wasted effort on all sides, as the reporter and the developer who will fix it trade emails until this information is really in place.

Eli Goldberg wrote the canonical Bug-Writing Guideline, available at http://issues.apache.org/bugwritinghelp.html. Generally, you'll be well-served by following these guidelines:

#### Include your system information

The Help Report Bug menu choice will fill this in automatically, but if you would prefer not to use this interface, there are several items you need to include in the report. We will need to know what operating system you are using (&Linux;, &MacOS;, or &Windows;), the version of &kde;, and the version of &kmymoney; you're running, and either the version of &MacOS; or &Windows; or the name and version of your &Linux; distribution and the version of your kernel.

#### Include a backtrace for crashes

The backtrace is often the single most useful piece of information in solving crashes.

#### Try to reproduce it

Let us know if you were able to do so. It's useful to know whether the bug only happened once and you couldn't get it to happen again or happens every time or happens sometimes but not others.

#### Include specific steps

This is a bad bug report: I entered a transaction, and &kmymoney; crashed. A much better bug report is: Using the transaction form, I entered a new transaction in my Credit Card account. I selected the Transfer tab, entered in an amount, then changed to the Deposit tab, and back to the Transfer tab. When I returned to the Transfer tab, &kmymoney; crashed. This bug is fully reproducible for me.

#### Tell us what you expected to happen

In some cases, this is obvious, but in more subtle bugs, sometimes you'll see a bug report where it is not obvious what the reporter expected to happen. Always tell us what you think should have happened.

#### Consider running with debugging enabled

By compiling a version configured with --enable-debug=full you can ensure that the best possible backtraces are generated. If you encounter a crash, run &kmymoney; again from within gdb, and reproduce the crash. When it crashes, type bt to generate a backtrace.

Running this way is a bit more difficult, so we don't expect all users to do this. However, if you're interested in helping &kmymoney; become as stable as possible, this is the best way to do it short of finding the bug in the code and sending in a patch.