Skrooge or kmymoney?

[claydoh]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

online banking feature means just downloading your transactions directly from kmm (or quicken, etc), but you can always download the data manually from your banks website and import it. Either way, the data is all one way. Think of it as "Advanced Check My Balances"

[woodsmoke]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

claydoh
thanks
woodsmoke

[The Liquidator]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

It's interesting that Woodsmoke revived this thread at the very time I was biting the bullet

I chose Skrooge for 2 reasons:

1. Kmymoney would not support the QIF files produced by Quicken 2002 as they are too old, so to use it it would have been necessary to start from scratch (possibly importing OFX files from the bank) or use an intermediary program (Gnucash?) first
2. Skrooge supports scheduled transactions whereas I read that kmymoney does not. I have rather a lot of these, unfortunately.

I hadn't considered direct online banking as an issue, probably because Quicken 2002 under Wine doesn't do it, but I tend to enter the spending there and then and then reconcile against a statement.


So Skrooge it is then, because of 1 and 2.

I was amazed at how it imported the QIF files, given the commonly reported problems with that type of file. I exported 12 years worth of transactions from Quicken on a transaction-only basis on each account and 1 by 1 imported into skrooge. The end result was that on 2 accounts that are closed there were nominal residual balances but all others balanced to the penny. I was impressed. Saved me hours of work.

It's not been all plain sailing. In setting up scheduled payments I initially clicked on them to open them, marked them as scheduled, only to find that in doing so I had set up duplicates! Some weird terminology (what on earth are "pointed" transactions?) and I have yet to do my first bank reconcilliation so I'm running Quicken and Skrooge in tandem at the moment.

I suspect most of the problems I have had have been down to lack of familiarity - I had to learn Quicken once, and MS Money before that so it needs a chance. Things became much easier when I got rid of unnecessary panels out of the left hand side-bar so it properly displayed all the program options. All in all though it looks like it's got the potential to be a replacement for Quicken and a resulting reduction in my dependence on Wine.

[woodsmoke]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

Very nice Liquidator, i'll keep all of this in mind as I get this going.

woodsmoke

[claydoh]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

kmm definitely supports scheduled transactions quite well and also supports qif import, though it does have some caveats as to why the format is not preferred.
http://kmymoney2.sourceforge.net/kde...ls.impexp.html
I have not tried this in Skrooge so can't see what the differences might be. But I do remember having to use the wizard to tweak the import settings so my files would be imported.

[The Liquidator]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

Thanks for that Claydoh.

It may be that the comparison notes I read were out of date, but they did indicate that skrooge supported scheduled payments and KMM didn't so I went with Skrooge.

Having said that the biggest issue for me was that KMM absolutely refused to import the QIF files, saying the format was too old and was no longer supported. Obviously intuit changed the format at some point. I did think about getting hold of of an older version of KMM but, tbh it was too much hassle at the time. I was therefore very pleasantly surprised at the almost flawless import of 12 years of data by skrooge.

Of course, now the data is in a more open format I'm sure that I'll be able to experiment with KMM with my current data with little difficulty, so it might now be worth a look.

[claydoh]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

basically it boils down to what you like to use

skrooge is a young project, advancing quite well
kmm is the "established" one, though still very active development-wise. The devs are very accessible and approachable. So I am quite the fan, boy KMM has had online banking, qif import, scheduled transactions for years, longer than Skrooge has been in existence, actually

My take is that Skrooge is simpler, while KMM is can be more complex if needed. As both are quite good, it is a win-win situation for everybody

To add a third option is a non-free, cross-platform program called Moneydance, also around for many years. It is free if you only download/import transactions from your bank - it is limited to 100 manually entered transactions. But I bet you will like Skrooge or Kmymoney better unless you need cross-platform.

[The Liquidator]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

basically it boils down to what you like to use

Couldn't agree more with that one -

I would like to ask you a question about KMM if I may. I understand that KMM operates on a double-entry basis, like the heavyweight accounting packages like Sage, Gnucash etc do. Whilst for my job I need to be able to find my way around stuff like that, I had always thought of that as overkill for my personal financials where I have a number of accounts with the same bank, but don't adopt rigid categories to my outgoings (although professionally I probably shouldn't be saying that )

Do you find the double-entry concept significantly complicates things?

[claydoh]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

I dunno, I use it for only 1 account - i only have a personal checking account. I could have set up, say, an account for my vehicle loan, but I never bothered, and I have no credit cards to manage.

I am not 100% sure what the difference between the 2 systems are, so perhaps that may say whether it is complicated or not. Or simply because I have one ledger/account it is all single-entry? It sure looks like single-entry in my ledger, from what I can tell.

I do not use all the features, just categories, scheduled trasactions/reminders and ofx downloads. I have played with other parts, but man, that is too much work for info that isn't too complicated for me to manage in my head

[The Liquidator]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

Looks like it might work for me too then.

Will give it a go, as I notice that skrooge can export in kmymoney format

[GreyGeek]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

I have my checking and savings accounts set up in KMyMoney. It is child's play to transfer funds back and forth. Setting up additional accounts is easy.

[The Liquidator]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

Well, after the recommendations I had to give kmymoney a try.

Exported all the data from skrooge as a KMM file and opened it in KMM. Simple!

The only issue I found was that on investigation all my scheduled transactions had been put back a month, but that was easy to fix. Otherwise it was flawless.

Yes, I have to agree that you can tell that KMM (which I'm now using ) has had a few years on Skrooge, but I can't get over how well the latter handled the data. It's got to be one to watch.

[Guest]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

Well, after the recommendations I had to give kmymoney a try.

Exported all the data from skrooge as a KMM file and opened it in KMM. Simple!

The only issue I found was that on investigation all my scheduled transactions had been put back a month, but that was easy to fix. Otherwise it was flawless.

Yes, I have to agree that you can tell that KMM (which I'm now using ) has had a few years on Skrooge, but I can't get over how well the latter handled the data. It's got to be one to watch.

Hi,

I am the main developer of Skrooge.
Even if KMyMoney is a good tool, we are developing Skrooge to have something more user friendly and powerful.
The main specificities of Skrooge are:
1-Undo / Redo
2-Many import formats supported
3-Many export formats supports from tables / graphs / reports
4-Massive update
5-"Search & process" to modify automatically transaction after an import
6-Properties to enhance the data model
7-Budget with automatic transfer
8-Customizable dashboard
...

If you don't want to use it due to missing functionalities, you can do a request from the bug tracker:
https://bugs.kde.org/

Be sure that we will do our best to satisfy you.

[claydoh]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

Hi Miraks!

and as we see again and again, everybody wins!

[The Liquidator]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

@Claydoh

I've installed the latest version of KMM from your ppa but I have a problem which, tbh, I had on the main repo version, which is that there are no help files. Selecting help opens the KDE Help Centre but the kmymoney section is empty. I'm currently looking to see whether it's possible to say upload ofx files to semi-automate bank reconcilliations but I'm in the dark at the mo.

I've been unable to find anything on how to go about installing the help files. Are you able to give me a few pointers please?

@miraks

Thanks for your post - it's nice when developers notice these things. I'll keep an eye open on how your project is going.