[Kmymoney] Fwd: Re: Forecasts in KMyMoney For Alvaro Soliverez Reply to Alvaro Soliverez

[Richard Boettger]

On 2014.07.16 15:32, Richard Boettger wrote:
> -------- Original Message --------
> Date: 	Mon, 14 Jul 2014 21:12:18 -0300
> From: 	Alvaro Soliverez <asoliverez at kde.org>
> To: 	Richard Boettger <crboettger at vif.com>
>
> Hello Richard,
> For future reference, please write to kmymoney at kde.org, since you'll
> get better input, and any answers are there for others to read and
> learn from.
>
> You can't do it with the forecast feature. Even if it uses history to
> calculate it, it's not as linear as you need in this case. Schedules
> is your best bet here. You should be able to make the imported
> transaction match the local transaction entered with the scheduled.
> However, I don't use the online account feature so someone else can
> guide you better in this regard.
>
> On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 5:29 PM, Richard Boettger
> <crboettger at vif.com> wrote:
>> Hi, Alvaro,
>>
>> I want to do a forecast for the payment of a credit debt.
>>
>> The full amount owed is now $1,276.  I am making $180 payments
>> monthly.
>>
>> I could use a calculator to find out how many payments there will
>> be, and, therefore, when I will have everything paid off.  But I
>> want to see how much is left to pay at the end of each month.  And I
>> want it to show up in the Home Forecast feature of KMyMoney.
>>
>> I have 3 on-line bank accounts, 2 chequing and 1 credit.  I am
>> making the monthly payments of $180 to the credit account from the
>> one chequing account.
>>
>> I am, however, downloading the transactions from all three bank
>> accounts manually every month.
>>
>> So, if I just did a scheduled transaction, there would be a
>> duplication of the payments.
>>
>> What I did as a temporary measure was make a copy of the entire
>> KMyMoney file and then actually just do a scheduled transaction
>> starting at June 2014 (the month with the $1,276 balance).  Then of
>> course I mustn't download any more transactions manually in this
>> second KMyMoney file.
>>
>> But this means I've got 2 different KMyMoney files to look at.  I'd
>> much rather have everything simplified and centralized in one
>> KMyMoney file.
>>
>> I tried to make sense of the "History" forecast.  I noticed it did
>> seem to make some calculations from the June credit account.
>> However, I have had some complications in my banking the last two
>> months.  One of these was that I consolidated two other credit debts
>> into my bank's credit account.  So there is the sum of these two
>> large amounts now showing up in my June credit account.  In short,
>> the History method of forecasting did not work with any of the
>> settings I tried.
>>
>> Is there a simple way to do this?  Some sort of symbolic way of
>> making the forecast without affecting all my other figures, and then
>> have the results show up in the Home, Forecast feature?
>>
>> Thanks for whatever help you can give me.
>>
>> Richard
>
> THANKS, ALVARO, but I couldn't get this to work.  I couldn't seem to
> have my VISA payment both as a scheduled transaction and from a
> manual download from my online bank accounts.  I think I'll have to
> give up on it.  But if anyone else at KMyMoney knows the answer, I
> will be glad to hear from him.

I'm not sure what the problem is, as I've been doing something like this 
for several years.  I have a scheduled payment from checking account to 
credit card account.  (I don't think it should matter that my credit 
card balance is frequently changing, where your credit account should 
only decrease.)  My updates are online/OFX not manually downloaded and 
imported, but that should not matter either.  The downloaded 
transactions match the scheduled ones, so I do not get any duplications. 
  (I actually have this set up with both my credit card and my wife's, 
and it works fine for both.  The only issue I have is that the online 
downloads from the credit cards come in with the posting date, and I 
prefer to use the original transaction date, but I suspect that could 
turn into a religious argument.  However, it does mean that the download 
matches the scheduled transaction, even if they are a few days apart.

So - did this provide any information you did not know/expect, or is 
there something I'm not following?

Jack

Hi, Jack,

This is going to be complicated.
First, I am using KMyMoney 4.6.0 (which was intended for KDE Platform 
Version 4.7.2 (4.7.2) "release 5") on OpenSuSE 12.1, Gnome 3.2.1.

I started learning KMyMoney on KDE, but a bug developed connected with 
the daily tips.  KMyMoney seized up and I couldn't uninstall and 
reinstall it.  So I moved to a Gnome partition and removed the daily 
tips feature immediately.

I had to download a manual from the Internet, on which the Find feature 
does not work.  (The Manual can't be opened from the Gnome Help button.)

I've been pretty well proceeding by reason and experiment, and I got one 
lead from your team (Alvaro).

At first I just downloaded one on-line banking account, and simulated a 
payment account.  I called this a symbolic parallel track.  One of the 
items downloaded was a transfer transaction.  I had set up an automatic 
transfer of $339 from one bank account to another.  The second account 
was the one from which I paid my bills.  I set this up, at my bank's 
website, on a recurring monthly payment basis.  (There is a screen for 
this.)

So the actual payments are done on a monthly basis by this recurring 
payment screen.

Meanwhile I wanted to simulate this in KMyMoney.  I assigned the $339 to 
a payment account and did a scheduled payment from there.  This worked 
fine, The forecast feature in the HOME screen worked perfectly.  This 
may have been rather like what you did.

But then a number of "real-world" changes took place.  My bank offered 
on-line debiting.  To make this work properly, I had to change the names 
of my two accounts.  Secondly, I made the decision to consolidate 3 
credit card debts in one, my bank's credit account.  This was to 
simplify everything.  But it also meant, given the format of my bank's 
credit account that I could simply import its statements into KMyMoney.

This is what I did, as this could provide me with a more precise, 
accurate grasp of my finances than could a "symbolic parallel track."

However, as you know, I could not find a way to make the forecast 
feature work properly, without duplication of transactions.

When you said that you were able to do so successfully with OFX, I 
remembered that although I was downloading transactions as cvs 
(spreadsheet) files, I had also eventually tried out QIF (Microsoft 
Money).  Here something interesting happened.  I think I had already 
done the scheduled transaction.  Now I imported the QIF file, whereon 
the account now showed a double, green and yellow, transaction line 
which stated that the same transaction had already been entered manually 
and so the two entries were combined as one transaction.

I've tried to go back in previous files and find samples of this but 
have been unsuccessful.  In any case the QIF imports didn't continue to 
work properly.

Can you see any easy answers in all of this? I'm just a beginner, and it 
may be simply that something basic is not sinking in.  I did not mention 
the bugs to be critical or nag, but rather because I thought you might 
see some answers in some of this.

I would like to make a suggestion.  You know, I could do a forecast with 
pen and paper in maybe a minute or two, but the results would not  be 
visible in KMyMoney.  I think this forecasting feature should be simple, 
straightforward, and intuitive.  Maybe you could add a feature in the 
Scheduled Transactions dialogue as "Projected" Forecast, in which the 
scheduled transactions would not affect the balances anywhere in 
KMyMoney, but would produce a nice nifty Forecast line in the HOME screen.

Well, I've spent just about as much time on this Forecast feature as I 
can, although I would certainly like it to work.

I've got just about everything else I need this year in KMyMoney.
So I might do without the Forecasting.

I should have mentioned that my present Gnome and Firefox are 
malfunctioning, and so I am just about to do a new installation of 
OpenSuSE.  But maybe these difficulties are connected with my problems 
in KMyMoney.  Maybe the Forecast problem will already be solved in 
OpenSuSE 13.1.

I would certainly like to hear back from you.

Richard

Hi, Jack,

I'm going to briefly circumnavigate the moderator.

I have found a sort of work-around for the forecast problem.

What I did:  I created 2 accounts:  a symbolical chequing account with a 
balance of $1,276, the amount of the credit debt; a symbolical VISA 
account with a balance of $1,276;

then 2 more accounts:  a symbolical assets rectifier account with 
-$1,276 to offset the symbolical chequing account; and a symbolical 
liability rectifier account with -$1,276 to offset the symbolical VISA 
account.

Then I created the symbolical scheduled transaction with $180 transfers 
from the symbolical chequing account to the symbolical VISA account.

The forecast settings were Scheduled and Future Transactions, 210 days, 
30 day cycle, starting on day 0.

Everything, all the account balances, and the forecast and payment 
schedule on the Home screen seem all right, and nothing anywhere else 
seems adversely affected.  I made a note of what I had done in one of 
the new files and made reference to these in the other 3 files.

The rectifier files may look a bit strange as time passes and I forget 
some of what this was all about.   But I think I may fly with this.

I still think it would be better to have a dialogue in the software that 
did this, as really four files may prove confusing later on.

Richard

Maybe you could pass this on to the Moderator.  I would still like your 
team to make an adjustment to the forecast feature if it would, myself 
remaining anonymous, and the details of my finances kept vague.

Thanks now!