Michael T. Edwardes

mte@users.sourceforge.net

2009-05-05 1.0 Once &kappname; 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 &kappname; 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 &kappname;. 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. The Main Window The Main Window The &kappname; 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 &kappname; and allow you to Create files or configure how &kappname; operates. The view selector consists of at least eleven icons in the left side of the main window, 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 contains 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 Schedules: Your recurring bills and deposits. Categories View Categories: Special accounts that provide a means for you to group associated transactions. Payees View Payees: All Payees used by &kappname;. Ledgers View Ledgers: Your account transactions. Investments View Investments: Your portfolio summary. Reports View Reports: A collection of useful reports, providing alternate 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 Used by the online banking module to provide feedback on running processes. This is a view provided by the KBanking plugin and may not be present on your system. &kappname; 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 &kappname; can only have one file open at a time. See the chapter on File Formats for more details about &kappname;'s data files. To create a new file you can either select FileNew from the menu or choose the New icon from the toolbar. &kappname; 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 &kappname; 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 &kappname; 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 &kappname;. &kappname; 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 &kappname; based upon your locale settings. Base currency selection Page Base currency selection page The following page allows you to create an initial account. For the typical &kappname; user this is a checking account. Checking account creation Page Checking account creation page Enter the name of the account and a possible 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 &kappname; 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 checkbox Once finished, press Next to proceed. Account template selection Page Account template selection page Choose the appropriate country and account template(s). Multiple templates, even from multiple countries can be selected using a combination of Ctrl and Shift together with the left mouse button. 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. Once finished with the template selection press Next to proceed. The next page of the wizard allows you to setup user preferences. 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 filename that will be used to store your financial data. An initial filename 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 &kappname; will create the file for you and open it. You can create an account in one of two ways both of which are described here: Using the menu To create an account using the menu select AccountsAdd new account. Using the Accounts view To create an account using the accounts view click on the Accounts icon in the view selector and then right click on the Asset 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. Assets, and all the other account types, are discussed in more detail later in this manual. Note that &kappname; uses the 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 Previous and Next buttons. Create an account using either of the two 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 &kappname;, 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. 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 &kappname; 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. 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. 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. If you currently use a financial manager application, &kappname; can import an account's transactions as long as they are in the Quicken Interchange Format (QIF). Most financial programs can export this format and 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. &kappname; 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. 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. Now that you have created some accounts and entered transactions it's a good idea to perform a backup. Because the file used by &kappname; is a standard Unix file you can just copy the file to another location to back it up or use the dialog provided by &kappname;. Using the dialog is the preferred method because if &kappname; 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 &kappname; Select Backup from the File menu and enter the folder where you wish the file to be copied to. 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 copied 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. You can contact the developers through their mailing list &devlist;. We're happy to hear about your experiences using &kappname;. To report a bug please use the interface provided by &kappname; by selecting HelpReport Bug and filling in the required information. 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: The HelpReport Bug menu choice will fill this in automatically, but if you would prefer not to use this interface, we will need to know the version of &kappname; you're running, the version of &kde;, the name and version of your distribution, and the version of your kernel. The backtrace is often the single most useful piece of information in solving crashes. 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. This is a bad bug report: I entered a transaction, and &kappname; 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, &kappname; crashed. This bug is fully reproducible for me. 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. 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 &kappname; 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 &kappname; 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.