Help with support for Tags?

Help
1

I am the treasurer of a small non-profit and would like to migrate from Quickbooks to KMyMoney. I have run into one snag that maybe someone can help me with.

The Quickbooks Chart of Accounts includes all kinds of items: bank accounts, income hierarchy, and expense hierarchy. It has a separate hierarchy called Class, which is totally user defined.

In KMyMoney, the Accounts list is actual (bank) accounts, and the Income and Expense stuff is in the Categories list. There is a separate user-defined list for Tags.

We have an event that occur every year.
I set up Income and Expense items for the event so we can track the event finances.
Some of the finances crosses year boundaries (e.g. start publicity in fall for spring event),
so each year there are entries for 2 events.

I need a way to separate the finances for each event, regardless of year.
In Quickbooks, I created a Class for each event (Event2023, Event2024, etc.).
That works well.

In KMyMoney, I created a Tag for each event (Event2023, Event2024, etc.).

That does not work so well.
There is no support for importing Tag data, so it must be handled manually.

We get registrations from PayPal, and import those into the finance program.
The IIF and QIF file formats support Account and Category/Class fields,
but NOT a third (Tag) field.
Importing the data into Quickbooks works fine because it just uses 2 fields.
Importing the data into KMyMoney does not work so well because there is no way to specify the Tag field.
The Tag has to be filled in manually after import.

One way around this is to create a new Income/Expense section for the event FOR EACH YEAR. That is way to cumbersome.

To isolate the finances for each event, it might be possible to set the report dates so it picks up only the entries for one event, but that will only work if there are no entries for both events in the same month.

Any other ideas on how to keep the finances for each yearly event separate?

2

You did not mention which version of KMyMoney on which operating system you are using. From mentioning QB it could be Windows. In the 5.1.x versions, tags have a slight problem which the dev team is aware of but that depends on the use case. If using tags works for you, I currently don’t know of a way to assign the tags during import. But it might be worth to implement in a future version.

Regarding your import: can you describe how you do that? Download in which format? Can you provide a (anonymized) sample transaction so that devs can see what could be done?

3

I am running 5.1.3-xxx on Windows 11.

The most important import is from PayPal, which can supply IIF and QIF formats.
I currently use IIF for Quickbooks, and would use QIF for KMyMoney.
Both formats support a Category/Class field, but not a field equivalent to Tags.

The PayPal transactions are split, because they include the PayPal fee.

The direct export from PayPal does not contain the correct Account and Category values, so I have to edit the files before import, but at least the fields are there to hold the data.
It is easier to correct everything in the import file than to use the program to manually edit each transaction after import.

We typically have 60+ registrations for one event.
I would have to manually add the Tag to all of them.
If it was just at the top transaction level, that is not hard because KMyMoney supports updating multiple transactions at the same time.
I need to add the Tag to the Split also, which means manually editing each transaction. That is tedious.
That’s why I am looking for more support for importing Tags,
or some other way besides Tags to be able to report on a specific event.

4

Thanks to the excellent Custom Reporting features,
I found a workaround that avoids the use of Tags.
For each transaction and split for a specific event, include a unique string like EVENT2024 in the memo field.
Create a Custom Report, filtering on that Text string, with “All” for the other filters.
That creates a report for just that event, including all dates.