Finally arrived from Quicken. Some Questions

[Dada Krpasundarananda]

Hello Thomas,

Thank you for the quick and clear answers.

Columns: I'm on version 5.2.70-da5718809. [Right-clicking the column 
header doesn't show a column menu for me.]

As a new user I found the column name "Detail" confusing. It shows the 
category, which is what the field is called when entering a transaction. 
Is there a reason it's called Detail? And is it helpful for you if I 
report small things like this, as a new user coming from Quicken?

About the conversion: I'm happy to share how it was done. My file had 16 
years of data from Quicken Deluxe 2013, 89 accounts and about 33,000 
transactions, in MXN, USD, EUR and AUD. Here is how it worked:

  * I exported everything from Quicken as a single QIF file and together
    with an income/expense report I gave this to my accounting Grok Bot.
    Below is it's answer:
  * A script split it by account and gave every transaction a stable
    unique ID, since Quicken 2013 still didn't use transaction ids. It
    was built from the account, date, amount, payee and order in the
    register.
  * Transfers between accounts appear twice in a QIF, once in each
    account. The script paired the two sides into a single transaction,
    which matched about 16,400 pairs, and flagged the few it couldn't match.
  * Categories and subcategories were rebuilt as KMyMoney accounts, and
    account currencies were set by hand, with fixed exchange rates. [I
    prefer it like that]
  * The .kmy file was then written directly as XML, and a check script
    compared every account balance and the yearly income and expense
    totals against Quicken reports. All 89 balances matched to the cent.
  * The scripts are plain Python. I'd be glad to clean them up and
    contribute them if they're useful to others.

Now me again:
About AI: I'm a computer engineer by training (1980s), but I haven't 
really programmed since, except now doing several quite big projects 
with AI, this has been a very good experience and is only getting better 
and fast. I started with Grok then switched to Grok CLI and did several 
smaller projects and then a bigger one. Then I found that Claude was 
better and switched to Claude CLI, but since a month Grok was solving, 
with ease, all the problems that Claude had trouble with, so I switched 
back, now I switched to Grok bots which is like having 14 (and counting) 
employees. Kind of blown away what it can do!

Well, to get back on topic, I'll make sure I understand and can explain 
anything I submit. The AI does also quite a good job documenting. So 
yes, if you like those suggestions (2 - 4) I'll give it a go. I'll 
probably do it in any case but it would be nice if others may benefit as 
well and not have to maintain a separate code base. I may also look at 
point 1, maybe as a plugin, or a stand alone program as I find the 
inline editing especially useful when going through bank statements to 
quickly enter categories.

Kind regards,
Dada

On 10/25/26 02:11, Thomas Baumgart via KMyMoney wrote:
> Hello Dada,
>
> thanks for getting in touch here. Here some answers to your questions:
>
> 1. That is by design. In earlier versions we had two different modes
>     (form based and inline) but that required to maintain two different
>     versions of the editor. We combined both (where the form display is
>     a leftover which may disappear also) to come up with the current
>     version.
>
> 2. That is a good idea and extension to the ledger view. Currently,
>     it is not available, though.
>
> 3. see 2.
>
> 4. see 2.
>
> 5. Yes, the current development version (looks like you're using it)
>     allows that. Right click on the header of the table in the ledger
>     view to select the ones you want to have.
>
> The project is always open for patches. In case you want to start, please
> make yourself familiar with the project platform onhttps://invent.kde.org/office/kmymoney
> and join the developer mailing list onkmymoney-devel at kde.org.
>
> Regarding the use of AI, we expect that the human author (you) is
> capable of explaining the generated code and knows what it is
> doing in detail.
>
> Hope that answers your questions. I have on myself: did your AI
> conversion provide any source code which we could add for others
> to the project (see contrib subdir for examples)?
>
> Thomas
>
> On Sonntag, 25. Oktober 2026 05:22:21 Mitteleuropäische Normalzeit Dada Krpasundarananda via KMyMoney wrote:
>
>> PS One more: 5) I'd like to know if the memo can have its own column in
>> the ledger, editable in-line.
>>
>> On 10/24/26 22:10, Dada Krpasundarananda wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> After trying many times over the years to migrate 16 years of data
>>> from Quicken 2013 and spending days of work I had given up. Recently I
>>> tried again with the help of an AI assistant (Grok Bot). I explained
>>> what I needed, sent the QIF export, and in less than 15 minutes it had
>>> converted everything. The file opened flawlessly in KMyMoney on Linux,
>>> with all 89 account balances matching Quicken to the cent. If anyone
>>> is still stuck migrating, it's worth a try.
>>>
>>> After more than 20 years with Quicken, I'd like to keep a similar
>>> workflow in KMyMoney (version 5.2.70 on KDE). Is any of the following
>>> possible?
>>>
>>>   1. Editing transactions in-line in the ledger. That's much faster
>>>      than the transaction box. I can hide the box, but it comes back as
>>>      soon as I click a transaction.
>>>   2. A list of accounts docked at the side, so I can quickly switch to
>>>      the one I need.
>>>   3. Arranging that list in a custom order.
>>>   4. Hiding accounts from that list.
>>>
>>> I've looked but couldn't find a way. If these aren't available, would
>>> you be open to a patch for 2 – 4? And maybe for 1, though I could
>>> imagine there is good reason it works the way it does?
>>>
>>> Thank you so much for KMyMoney.
>>> Dada
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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