Track Investments

Securities accounts are a special case in the investment accounts group. Their value not only rises or falls when you buy or sell assets like stocks or bonds but also due to price fluctuations. For this reason, keeping track of your securities is a little more complicated, but KMyMoney always provides an up-to-date overview of the value of your securities accounts.

You will need to enter a lot of details about your securities investments. To do this, switch to Investments in the left sidebar and then Select Account. After right-clicking on what is still an empty overview below this, select New investment. This launches the New Investment wizard, where you fill in the fields to name and describe the new security (Figure 3). Pressing Finish completes the wizard.

Figure 3: Entering investment data is somewhat more complex, but you will be rewarded with a precise overview of your assets.

You will need to enter the quantity and price of your securities. Click on Ledgers in the overview on the left and select the desired securities account in the top left drop-down menu. After right clicking on what is still an empty overview, choose New. Under Activity, choose Add shares to enter your share portfolio. You can also indicate when you are buying or selling shares.

In the Securities tab, select the security you just entered data for as described above, and then add the number of units you hold in your securities account. To enter the current security price, go back to Investments in the sidebar on the left. There you will see an overview of your securities; now the quantity will also appear there. After right clicking on a security, you can then add the price. You can choose to add the price either manually or to retrieve the price from the Internet.

Income and Expenses

After completing the setup phase, you can start recording transactions. Now the income and expense accounts come into play. KMyMoney calls these accounts, which you can find in the left sidebar, Categories. For example, categories might include food expenses or freelance writing income. It makes sense to first browse through the list and remove categories that you do not need as well as adding categories that you are missing. You can also edit the categories here.

You can assign a new name or move the position of the category within the account framework. Business owners will also want to specify which categories are relevant for sales tax. This means that KMyMoney only posts the net amount to the category and automatically assigns the tax amount to the category for sales tax. You also decide whether a category should appear in the tax report. Create separate categories for income-related expenses and donations and tell KMyMoney to include them in the tax report. In this way you have all the data you need for your income tax return at your fingertips.

Posting Transactions

To post a new transaction, click on Ledgers in the left sidebar. When you get there, choose the right account in the selection menu above (e.g., Cash). You will now see an overview of all the postings for this account. Pressing Ctrl+Insert or selecting New in the context menu lets you post a new item. At the bottom of the window, the input fields for this new item now appear.

First decide whether this is a Deposit transaction (income), a Transfer (from one account to another; e.g., from a checking account to cash), or a Withdrawal (expense). For example, if you buy the current issue of this magazine at a newsstand, the latter would be the right choice. In the left sidebar, you create data records for who you are paying via the Payees item.

Unless you're running a business, you may want to simply leave this field empty instead of entering each individual payee. The appropriate expense account is entered in the Category field (Newspapers in this example). Now enter the Date and Amount; there is also space for a Memo. The Status item is only relevant for your bank accounts, where you store whether you have already reconciled your records with your bank statement.

KMyMoney also handles split transactions, (i.e., transactions where you assign a payment to several income or expense accounts). For example, if you have bought food, clothing, office supplies, and magazines at a single store and paid for them by credit card, only the total amount will appear on your credit card account. You need to split this between the appropriate expense accounts. To do this, proceed as described above, but leave the Category field empty at first and click on the small button to the right of it instead. A new dialog box opens in which you enter the different categories and their partial amounts (Figure 4).

Figure 4: The split transaction feature allows you to record both the total amount of a credit card purchase and the breakdown of how much of it you spent on each category, such as food or clothing.