Bug 323482

Would using Tags be at least a partial solution to this problem?

Created attachment 113547 [details]
clarifying example

openOfficeSpreadsheet/ods

Jack,

Thanks for your reply, sorry for the delay responding.

I remain deeply grateful for you and your developers making KMyMoney 
available, and basing it upon the familiar Intuit Quicken product of the 
mid 2000s.  The old Quicken product was based upon a database that had 
separate fields for category and taxFormLineNumber, if I remember 
correctly that you created by appending "::" to your category names 
followed by your taxFormLineNumber names, and the program would do all 
the sorting and searching to allow reporting separately by category or 
taxFormLineNumber.

Yes, the KMyMoney Tag field could be a part of the solution. However, 
the utility is limited, because you cannot assign Payees a "Default tag" 
like you can a "Default category", which means the arduous assignment of 
a tag to  every single imported transaction, every time.  This 
represents more work to me than the already arduous work-around of 
creating many copies of every category for all the permutations of 
category of business expense and catagory of tax form line number.  The 
latter, however, allows me to import transactions and have the category 
of business expense and category of tax form line number automatically 
assigned by payee. I do have to do some arduous post processing of my 
reports at year end, requiring exporting the reports to a spreadsheet, 
then manipulating the data by text string parsing and processing to 
create two separate columns, one for category of business expense, and 
another column for category of tax form line item.  The syntax I made up 
for my work-around to the limitation of KMyMoney is that I name my 
categories as so:

<CategoryBusiness>:<subCategoryBusiness>:<subsubCategoryBusiness>:Tax.<CategoryTaxFormName>.<CategoryTaxLineName>.<subCategoryTaxLineName>

Then I export the report to a spreadsheet which uses text formulas to 
find the string ":Tax." and parse the CategoryBusiness to one column and 
parse the CategoryTax to another column.  From this I can perform my 
various business analyses and tax reporting.

If KMyMoney allowed Payors to separately be assigned BOTH a category 
(CatagoryBusiness) and a tag (CatagoryTax) so imported items were 
automatically assigned independent categories and tags, then I would no 
longer need to post process outside KMyMoney, and could simply use 
KMyMoney's reports.  THIS WOULD BE EVEN MORE POWERFUL THAN THE OLD 
2000'S ERA QUICKEN, as the user could have much shorter lists of 
independent business categories and tax categories, without having to 
create numerous permutations of both.

For purposes of clarifying example, I have attached a spreadsheet 
showing the post processing I have to do outside of KMyMoney, with 
amount numbers changed for privacy. Column A represents the 
CategoryBusiness level of detailed itemization I need to make business 
decisions, and Column J represents the parsing I have to do in order to 
prepare my taxes.  I have highlighted in color bands groups of 
CategoryBusiness that all have the same CategoryTax, although the 
mapping is not always "many to one" and just as well could be "one to 
many".  There is another page to the spreadsheet that then sorts and 
subtotals all the CategoryTax items by tax form line which I did not 
include.  If Payers could be assigned tags independently of their 
assigned categories, I could do all of this with KMyMoney's report 
feature without any post processing.

I am currently using KMyMoney Version 4.7.2, so perhaps this has already 
been implemented in a newer version?

Thank you for replying to my post, and thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Michael Stelman.

Revisiting this for other reasons, might it be possible to use something different than double colon (such as "|") to make a category name "Class category|Tax category" or maybe "Tax category|Class category"?  To KMM, it would just be one category, but it might help with reporting or your post-processing.