KMyMoney is a fabulous product, and I have chosen it over Quicken (too expensive, quits working after 3 years), GNUcash (less payee matching features, and lacks automated downloading and importing of all accounts with a single click), and Nola Pro(far behind in features). Thank you for your tremendous development effort. A.) The only limitation that affects me compared to Quicken which offers a work around for this feature missing in KMyMoney is the absence of a separate database field for taxCategory (separate from Category, which I use instead for BudgetCategory). In Quicken you can get around this by using Category for budget categories, and Class for tax categories. Useful examples showing the distinction, together with Quicken 2005 nomenclature (Quicken separates category field from class fields with a double colon): Category(budget related)::Class: (tax related) Income:SelfEmploymentNewspaperDelivery::1040ScheduleC:Income Income:SelfEmploymentLemonadeStand::1040ScheduleC:Income Expense:SelfEmployment:ComputerToDoTaxReturns::1040ScheduleC:Expense:Depreciation Using Quicken, I can separately run reports subtotaling my Classes(tax related) to pay my taxes, and then separately run reports subtotalling my Catagories(budget related) to see if I should quit my money losing newspaper route and open two more money making lemonade stands if my report should show that. Lacking separately queriable, sortable, reportable field for budget categories and tax categories in KMyMoney creates some time consuming necessity to export reports to CSV spreadsheets and do some difficult post processing parsing of the fields to resort and re-subtotal separate budgetCategories and taxCategories. B.) In the reporting feature, KMyMoney only allows subtotaling by the first and last branches of the category trees, but not by user settable intermediate branchpoints, which is a feature in GNUcash that would be useful in KMyMoney. Thank you for your consideration. I love your program! Reproducible: Always
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.