[Kmymoney] brokerage account

[Jack]

On 2013.05.25 05:14, Gary Kirkpatrick wrote:
> How do you tell if you need to establish a brokerage account?  There  
> is
> definitely cash in this account and I can even withdraw funds from an  
> ATM
> but there is no separate account number for the cash.  Do I put the  
> same
> account number in KMM?
Gary,

I think this has been stated several times in this list, but I guess it  
hasn't been clear enough.

Institutions have accounts that handle both securities and cash.  KMM  
does not.  In order to use KMM to track such an account, you need to  
set up two accounts.  The KMM investment account handles all the  
security transactions, but in only contains securities.  Whenever you  
enter (download or manual) a transaction that uses or creates cash (buy  
or sell securities) the transaction includes a field where you specify  
a KMM account that can handle cash, and the money is deposited to or  
withdrawn from that account.  You can use any cash/checking/savings  
accounts for this, but it is most common to create such an account in  
KMM at the time you create the investment account, and if you do that,  
it is referred to as the Brokerage account for that Investment  
account.  The brokerage account is then offered as the default account  
when needed while entering transactions in the investment account.

This is the main reason it is very important to be sure when you are  
talking about a KMM account, and when you are talking about the account  
at your institution.

Now - as to the OFX downloading, and mapping the KMM accounts to an  
on-line account.  As I said a while back, I have personally given up on  
downloading and just enter all investment transaction manually, just  
for the reasons you have been discovering.  You cannot map both KMM  
accounts to the same institution account.  When you download to the  
investment account, although it will fetch ALL transactions, only the  
investment transactions will actually get imported into the KMM  
account.  That might work for you, but it will leave two sets of  
actions after any import.  First, you will have to confirm that for any  
transaction with a cash part (buy/sell) that the appropriate brokerage  
account is specified in the transaction.  I believe, but am not  
certain, that once you do this manually a few times, KMM is likely to  
import new transactions similar to existing transactions, so it might  
get it right for future downloads.  Second, you will have to manually  
enter any completely cash transactions, such as cash depsits or  
withdrawals, transfers to/from your checking account, and interest.

I think it is important that you understand how all this works before  
going much further, so you don't get unnecessarily frustrated.

Jack