[Kmymoney] Problems entering a "Buy" investment

[Peter Kidd]

Hi, I am re-sending a revised version of a message I sent to another
forum, apologies to those who have seen it before; but I provide much
more detail here.

I am new to KMM, using KMM 4.5.0 (I can't find instructions on how to
upgrade!) on Ubuntu 10.10. I have recently imported data from MS Money
and massaged it into shape.

I want to enter details of a "Buy" transaction in an investment
account, so I go to the account's ledger. Let's assume I want to buy
£125 worth of shares valued at £1.01 each

I click "New" and it produces a form with a grey drop-down lists with
default values, blank fields for drop-down lists, a date field, etc.
The first grey drop-down says "Buy shares" by default, so I leave it
alone. (If I do click it, and select "Buy shares" manually, two of the
fields disappear -- is this a bug?)

I click the down-arrow at the right-hand side of the "Security" and
"Account" fields, which also produce drop-down lists, and make my
selections. There are no "Fees" or "Interest" to record, so I leave
these  and the "Memo" fields blank.

The Help file at
http://docs.kde.org/development/en/extragear-office/kmymoney/details.investments.ledger.html#id2541468
has the following text in the "Investment Transactions" section under
the heading "Shares, Price & Total Amount":

"For buy, sell, and cash dividend transactions, the number of shares,
the price per share, and the total amount of the transaction must be
established. You can enter any two of these, and KMyMoney will
calculate the third." [This is also how MS Money works, so this seems
natural and intuitive to me]

I do not know how many shares my £125 will buy, and I assume KMM will
calculate it for me, so I do not put anything in the "Share" field. I
enter "1.01" in the "Price" field (I assume that this is for the price
per share). Below this there is an unlabelled field with "0.00" in it.
I do not know what this is for, so I leave it alone.

I enter "125" in the "Amount" field (I assume that this is for the
total amount of the transaction). When I click outside this field my
"125" changes to "125.00" and "£ (124)" appears below it next to the
label "Total".  But the "Shares" field still reads "0", so KMM has
apparently not calculated for me how many shares my £125 will buy.

In the broad grey band between the ledger at the top, and the
data-entry form at the bottom, the only option that is not greyed-out
is "Cancel", so there is no way to save the details I have entered.

I may be doing something completely dumb, but if so I hope that the
above description gives the developers an idea of how a KMM newbie
encounters this process.

It seems to me that the program should work the way it is described in
the documentation, but it does not. For the benefit of first-time and
new users, it would also be helpful if the documentation explained
what every field is for, as many labels are ambiguous (e.g. does
"Price" mean total price, or price per share?)

I should finish by saying that I am generally enjoying using KMM, and
very glad to finally be free of MS Money!