[Kmymoney-devel] New account wizard question

[Jack]

On 2010.07.09 19:15, Fernando Vilas wrote:
> On Friday, July 09, 2010 16:18:34 Jack wrote:
>> In the second step of the "Select Accounts" part of creating a new  
>> file, the dialog says "Select groups of accounts that  
>> correspond......"  I find several issues with this dialog.
> >
>> -- the lower right pane is labeled "Accounts"  but what shows up in  
>> them is categories, not accounts.  Should the label change, or am I  
>> misunderstanding something?
> >
>> -- I have tried several of these (US) templates, and none of them  
>> created any accounts, only categories.
> >
>> -- several of the templates say (in the "Detailed description" to  
>> use along with a base category group, but there is no explicit  
>> notice which are considered the base groups.  Also - that implies  
>> that you can select more than one category, but the usual way of  
>> Ctl-Click does not work for me - it just replaces the selected  
>> template with the new one.
> >
> > Thanks for any explanations.

> From an accounting standpoint, categories are accounts. The parent  
> account for them is either Income or Expense. If I pay rent with  
> cash, then there is a debit on the Rent account and a credit on my  
> Cash account.
Ah.  I did think of payees as accounts (of a sort) but not really  
categories.  I guess this makes sense - since you always need a  
category for a transaction, but not necessarily a payee.

> While KMM uses a double-entry system, that is mostly abstracted away  
> from the user by using the concept of categories.
This also confuses the discussion/explanation of split transactions,  
which I think has come up on this list more than once.

> Maybe the explanation needs to be clearer, and possibly the labels  
> need to change also. I can see how it could be confusing to a user.
I think it would be clearer if in cases where you mean a category, and  
not any other account, to only say category.  Particularly in this part  
of the wizard - since the templates only create categories, and not  
"user" accounts (for lack of a better term to distinguish.)

However, this still leaves open the question of whether the user should  
be able to select more than one template at this step.