KMyMoney vs Gnucash double-entry entry

[Michael Berger]

Dear Jesus,

a hundred people a hundred opinions/specific needs.
In all my life as an industrial consultant (technical and financial, now 
retired) I have tried may be one dozen of different financial software 
programs.
KMM is simply brilliant for a broad sector of (private?) users. I think 
we can agree that whatever software one uses highly depends on his/her 
needs and that's perfectly allright.

Nevertheless, there are still some useful features missing and I must be 
mistaken if Thomas and other developers would not be aware of that. I 
trust they are working on it.

Thanks to the developers and cheers!

Michael Berger


On 07.05.19 11:34, Thomas Baumgart wrote:
> Jesus,
>
> On Sonntag, 28. April 2019 18:00:55 CEST Jesus Varela wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I was reading the handbook and have a question.
>>
>> "As with GnuCash, data is entered in the form of transactions, each
>> generally consisting of 2 or more split entries. In fact, valid GnuCash
>> transactions will always contain at least 2 splits, and to conform to
>> GnuCash's double-entry bookkeeping standard, these must be in monetary
>> balance (i.e., they must balance out to zero). KMyMoney encourages, but
>> does not enforce, this standard, but any imported transaction which is not
>> balanced will be marked in the ledger view as having a problem."
>>
>> That is under the section, balanced transactions.
>> https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/extragear-office/kmymoney/details.impexp.html
>>
>> I want to know, why doesn't KMyMoney adhere to the same standard, that the
>> monetary value must balance to zero?
> In fact it does exactly that.
>
>> Double-entry accounting rules, should be standard, no?
> Yes.
>
>> I am also wondering, while on a similar topic, why KMyMoney does not regard
>> expenses and income as accounts instead of expense categories. Then just
>> make everything a transfer.
> We call them category but under the hood they are accounts.
>
>> For example, I could see having a list of accounts like so:
>>
>> Expense Account: Dinning
>> And Categories:
>> -  Fast Food
>>   - restaurants
> In that sense, KMyMoney does not support categories.
>
>> I want to use KMyMoney but I want to make sure it is adhering to all the
>> best financial practices. Treating personal finances like business
>> finances, same balance sheet reports, cash flow reports and profit loss
>> reports, is not a bad idea.
> That's exactly what KMyMoney does (or at least tries to do)
>
>> The current cash flow report is not really
>> doing what a cash flow report should do. That report is extremely valuable
>> for people to better their financial situation.
> That could well be. If you have some idea how to improve that are, please provide a proposal.
>
>> Until KMyMoney is ready for business use, I don't think it needs the extra
>> customer, jobs and vendor support.
> I am not aware that there are specific business related features built into KMyMoney.
>
>> KMM is a great product! Thanks for all of your outstanding work.
> Thanks for the feedback.
>
>