FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)



Introduction

Hopefully this page will answer many of the questions a first time user may have as well as answering many common problems encountered while building and running KMyMoney.


Questions

  1. How do I compile from Git?
  2. Where do I find some more information about OFX parameters?
  3. Why is a transaction shown in red and how can I get rid of the color?
  4. Why does the QIF import choke on a wrong date format?
  5. When I start KMyMoney I get a "Malformed URL" error. What's wrong?
  6. I have mistyped the name of a payee and want to change it in all transaction. Is there a global search/replace?
  7. Why is there no translation for 'my' language?
  8. What options are useful to pass to 'configure'?
  9. When I compile from source, all the icons show up as missing. What did I do wrong?
  10. How can I use distcc to help speed up compilation of KMyMoney, or other KDE (C++) applications?
  11. The Git version is broken! What do I do now?
  12. Speaking of names: where did the "2" come from? Is it KMyMoney or KMyMoney2?
  13. Accounts and categories show a total balance of 0.00 which is wrong. What's going on here?
  14. Will KMymoney work on my Xubuntu desktop?
  15. How can I report a bug?

Answers

1. How do I compile from Git?

Our "Installing From Git" page contains all the information about compiling and installing from Git.

2. Where do I find some more information about OFX parameters?

Here are some external sources which might give your more information: ofxblog and ofxhome.

3. Why is a transaction shown in red and how can I get rid of the color?

The transaction is shown in red if parts of the amount are not categorized. This is most commonly caused by importing a QIF or OFX file or by downloading statement data online. So all you have to do is to modify the transaction such that the whole amount of the transaction is assigned to categories.

4. Why does the QIF import choke on a wrong date format?

The QIF specification does not specify a definite format for dates. Several different formats are used and the format is selected by the source of your QIF file (e.g. your bank). In order to cope with many different date formats, KMyMoney provides 'QIF profiles'. Each profile allows to customize KMyMoney to accept the input data format chosen by the originator of the QIF file.

With respect to dates, KMyMoney supports m/d/y as well as d/m/y formats. 2 digit year info as well as 4 digit year info is also supported. For 2 digit year info some institutions use an apostrophe to identify a certain range of years. Within the date tab of the QIF profile editor you can also select the behaviour of KMyMoney in case of such an apostrophe.

Date Format Meaning
%yy identifies two digit year info
%yyyy identifies four digit year info
%m identifies a numeric month (1-12)
%mmm identifies a short month name (e.g. Jan, Feb)
%d identifies a numeric day (1-31)

Example: If you see a date of 21/3'03 in your records, select the '%d/%m/%yy' setting. It does not matter if you have a / or an ' preceeding the years. Therfore, '%d/%m%yy' would be the wrong format. If your bank sends you this file for the year 2003 then you probably want to set the apostrophe handling to '2000-2099'. Then the above record would be interpreted to carry the '21st of March 2003' as it's date.

If you picked the wrong date format in the QIF profile, KMyMoney cannot correctly interpret the data and shows error messages. The default in this case is to use today's date.

5. When I start KMyMoney I get a "Malformed URL" error. What's wrong?

Usually the reason for this is that you didn't run 'make install' as root. This step actually copies all of the icons, and other files needed by KMyMoney to run properly. If you did run this, make sure you passed the correct prefix to 'configure' at the beginning of your compile.

6. I have mistyped the name of a payee and want to change it in all transaction. Is there a global search/replace?

There is no global search and replace function in KMyMoney. Nevertheless, it is easy to change a payees name: select the Payees view and search the entry with the name you want to change. Enter the new name. Since the transactions only use a reference to the payees record, all transactions now show the new name.

7. Why is there no translation for 'my' language?

Most likely, the reason is that no one has offered to translate it yet. Translating KDE/QT-based applications is very simple, and does not require any programming skills. If you would like to translate KMyMoney into your language, please post a message to the KMyMoney Developers List, and we will give you the details on how you can easily provide a translation for us.

8. What options are useful to pass to 'configure'?

The most useful option is the 'prefix' option. This specifies how where you want to install KMyMoney, and should be the same location that KDE is installed. Many distro's will find this location on its own, but if it can't, you can use the command line app 'kde-config --prefix' to read out what the prefix should be. For SuSE-based distro's, /opt/kde3 is the usual location. For RedHat-based distro's, including Mandrake and Fedora Core, KDE is installed in /usr/bin.

Another useful option is the --enable-debug option. This will allow you to build KMyMoney with debug symbols, which help in trying to figure out crashes. This option is essential if you are a developer and want to contribute.

9. When I compile from source, all the icons show up as missing. What did I do wrong?

Usually the reason for this is that you didn't run 'make install' as root. This step actually copies all of the icons, and other files needed by KMyMoney to run properly. If you did run this, make sure you passed the correct prefix to 'configure' at the beginning of your compile.

10. How can I use distcc to help speed up compilation of KMyMoney, or other KDE (C++) applications?

distcc is a tool developed from the Samba team to help distribute compiling of applications on multiple machines at once. You have to set up distcc on each machine that you want to compile on, and distcc takes care of distributing the compile tasks to all of the various machines. An article at ibm.com is what got me started, and cut down my compile times by a factor of 8.

After I first installed distcc, I couldn't get the distributed compiling to work. I stumbled upon this post in the gentoo forums which told me how to get distcc to work with C++ applications. After I created the /usr/bin/dist++ shell script, (and performing an 'export CXX=dist++'), the next time I ran make on KMyMoney, it was being compiled on two machines.

My compile with distcc was about 8 times as fast as compiling just on my local machine. My local machine is a Athlon XP 1700, 512 MB ram. Compiling with just the local machine took 17m51s after running make clean on my current codebase. I added my second computer, a 2.4 GHz Celeron, with 384 MB ram, and the compile time shrank to 2m45s.

Another useful link on this topic is at OSNews.com.

11. The Git version is broken! What do I do now?

Usually the reason for this is that one of the developers made a change to the code that requires a clean reconfigure. Please run a 'git pull --rebase' to update your local repository.

After following these steps carefully, if there is still a problem compiling, please write the KMyMoney Developers List and send in the failed output of "make".

12. Speaking of names: where did the "2" come from? Is it KMyMoney or KMyMoney2?

The name of the app is KMyMoney. The "2" is historical legacy from when the project went from KDE 1 to KDE 2. You can search the mailing list archive for more details.


13. Accounts and categories show a total balance of 0.00 which is wrong. What's going on here?

This is a design problem in the 0.8 branch which has been fixed in the current development version. It will show the total of the account and all its sub-ordinate accounts when the entry in the tree is collapsed. If the entry is expanded, the value shown will be the one of the account without the sub-oridinate accounts included.

Due to design reasons, the fix cannot easily be backported to the 0.8 branch.


14. Will KMymoney work on my X/Ubuntu desktop?

It will work, but you will have to install the basic KDE libraries first, as Xubuntu comes with Gnome libraries by default. If you want to install from Git, you should install these packages:


15. How can I report a bug?

You can report a bug here.
You can also browse the mailing list archive to search for previous discussions of similar bugs.


If you have a question that is not answered on this FAQ, please don't hesitate to post it on the KMyMoney Developers List or KMyMoney Users List and we will try to answer you as soon as possible.

To subscibe to one of the mailing lists, Choose a list on the KMyMoney mailing lists Page.