[Kmymoney-devel] Feature request

Jack ostroffjh at sbcglobal.net
Sat Apr 13 22:12:29 UTC 2013


On 2013.04.13 13:20, TIm Dawson wrote:
> One of the most basic features that I would have assumed would have  
> been a "gimme" in any financial management package that can be  
> utilized in conjunction with a financial organization (IE, can upload  
> transactions from a bank) would be the ability to actually schedule  
> those uploads to happen *WITHOUT* any user intervention.  Either I am  
> totally blind, or in the 5+ years that I have been using KMymoney,  
> this feature has been painfully and notably absent.
> 
> Perhaps it's just my patterns as a user, in that I don't necessarily  
> reconcile my accounts monthly (more like quarterly, unless there is  
> an issue) and what happens is that Chase only keeps 30 days of online  
> transactions uploadable, so inevitably, I spend way too much time  
> hand entering stuff that should have been uploaded.  Barring my  
> remembering to do this on a periodic basis (which is an absurd  
> requirement . .  .) a mechanism to schedule this via cron (or other  
> process scheduler) to run *WITHOUT* user intervention would appear to  
> be an obvious need - and need not be anything more sophisicated than  
> a command line option such that kmymoney can be run such as "kmymoney  
> --update-all" and have an OFX update occur, the same as if update-all  
> was selected from the gui, but with no intervention, and no need to  
> load the gui to a desktop.
> 
> Seems like all the parts are there . . . again, I can't fathom why  
> this isn't available (or have managed to miss it for years . . . ).
> 
Tim,

I don't think you have missed anything, although I don't see the  
absense of this feature to be either painful or notable.  However, to  
make sure it does not get forgotten, you can open a ticket at  
bugs.kde.org, using the severity of "wishlist."

As for whether it's simple and essential or not - that's up for  
debate.  Personally, I prefer to download transactions more frequently,  
and interactively, so I can assure correct matching of payees and  
categories.  Also, if there were a command line option that could be  
scheduled with cron, it would mean that the password  to the OFX  
account would need to be available.  That may or may not be an issue  
for you - but it likely is for some people.  I have my passwords stored  
in kwallet, and the first time it is accessed in any session, it  
requires me to enter my password to open the wallet.  If you remove the  
requirement for a password to the wallet, some people would consider  
that a security issue.  I know KMM can store the password itself, but  
some don't consider that sufficiently secure.  Yes - KMM could have the  
feature, and the paranoid among us could keep the password on kwallet  
and just not use the feature, but this leads to a second point (as has  
been pointed out on this list) developer time is somewhat limited, and  
all the developers are volunteers.  They add features and fix bugs  
because they want to, not because someone says it is essential.

As a short term workaround - you could have cron send you a message  
reminding you to download your transaction.


Jack


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