Problems in 5.2.1 (slowness, original payee, details...)

[michaelw]

I am a long-term use of kmm, going through many versions till 5.1.3. Recently, I upgraded to 5.2.1 on Windows 11, and found some problems which make me consider going back:

• The ledger view can be extremely slow. This seems to be limited to ledger where there are many imported transactions. I assume this is because there is some slow code creating the clickable links. I often import many transactions (like a whole year of transaction history from the bank to do my tax return statement), and this makes navigation in the ledger halt to a crawl. Is there some way to disable whatever makes it slow (presumably the icons)?
• “Original payee inserted”: Since payee matching has always been a problem, long ago I extended my import filter to add the original payee at the end of the Memo field. Now I get it twice, and it is the first line. Can this behavior be turned off with a setting please, and/or make it selectable whether the text that gets inserted is at the top or bottom of the memo field (at the bottom, it wouldn’t bother me)?
• The new ledger shows additional columns. However, why is the “Detail” just showing the Category, and not the Memo? This would be much more informative for me? At least give the user a choice whether to add the memo field as a separate column!
• I had a couple of crashes when entering a date (when mistyping, I believe I entered an invalid date like 32 in the day field, then ESC-ed out, then KMM asked me to save the file and closed. Even when I saved the file, all my changes since the last save were lost!)
• Having to enable the Filter field with Ctrl-F is a minor nuisance, but there could be a setting to always show it. If I hadn’t found the information in this forum, I would have had to revert to 5.1.3 immediately, as the filter is crucial for my workflow.
• Furthermore, why not finally make all columns filterable? This is more like a feature request than a problem with 5.2.1, but seeing as this was reworked, one could have gone the whole length…
• Dark mode: while it overall works quite well, the colors for imported transactions are incompatible with dark mode, so I had to switch the app to light mode with the command-line switch documented here.
• Finally, I noticed that transaction matching was unreliable. I import statements from different accounts from my bank, so transactions between these accounts should be matched. This works in some cases, but not in other, and I believe it was more reliable in the past (although I can’t verify). Is there some way to make this more reliable? The payee name of course is different, but date and amount are exactly the same, and the memo as well…

Despite all these problems, I’ll give 5.2.1 a chance, and hopefully these things will get ironed out over time, or maybe there are some workarounds I don’t know about. My import workflow pipes .csv files through an .awk script that creates a .qif on the fly, so I do have a transaction id and can transform data on the fly quite flexibly…

Thanks!

Michael

[ipwizard]

Thank you for the extensive and valuable feedback.

@michaelw

The ledger view can be extremely slow.

I am not sure if the performance is degraded by the fact that there are many imported transactions. I usually don’t see more than a dozen of them at once because I import from my banks on a regular (mostly daily) basis. You can try if accepting them all makes a difference afterwards. If not, we need to investigate this further.

@michaelw

“Original payee inserted”:

Would you mind opening a feature request on our tracker so that it does not get lost? Thanks in advance.

@michaelw

why is the “Detail” just showing the Category, and not the Memo

Did you try the option to show all details?

The ledger lens does it for the selected transactions only.

@michaelw

I had a couple of crashes when entering …

This sounds to be bug 510209 which was just fixed.

@michaelw

Dark mode

This is a problem when using Windows 11 as it seems. The primary environment for KMyMoney is Linux/KDE and there this problem does not appear AFAIK. There are some posts on this forum that explain how to possibly resolve the issue.

@michaelw

Finally, I noticed that transaction matching was unreliable

Transactions matching is based on the payee name. The same payee object can be identified by different values. Use the regex method of payee matching. I have the same problem with my own transactions where banks don’t provide my name but a more general text. Here are some of those entries:

This works very reliable!

[michaelw]

Amazing, thank you for the quick reply!

@ipwizard

@michaelw

The ledger view can be extremely slow.

I am not sure if the performance is degraded by the fact that there are many imported transactions. I usually don’t see more than a dozen of them at once because I import from my banks on a regular (mostly daily) basis. You can try if accepting them all makes a difference afterwards. If not, we need to investigate this further.

I tested this quickly. When accepting all transactions, this did not change anything. But I noticed it’s the transactions marked in red an the yellow alert sign that make it slow. If there are more than a few on screen, navigation can take several seconds. I assigned some random category to them, removing the error, then it was fast again. Maybe there is something extremely slow in rendering the alert icon?

@ipwizard

@michaelw

“Original payee inserted”:

Would you mind opening a feature request on our tracker so that it does not get lost? Thanks in advance.

Ok, done!

@ipwizard

@michaelw

why is the “Detail” just showing the Category, and not the Memo

Did you try the option to show all details?

The ledger lens does it for the selected transactions only.

Yes, I know this, but then each row is higher. I think before, the memo was sometimes shown. But if you have a big screen, it would be perfectly viable to show a column for the category and a column for the Memo, especially if you turn off the “posted date”. The memo would be much more useful than the posted date

@ipwizard

@michaelw

I had a couple of crashes when entering …

This sounds to be bug 510209 which was just fixed.

Oh great. Is this fixed in the 4844 windows build? Not sure how to map the build numbers to anything…

@ipwizard

@michaelw

Dark mode

This is a problem when using Windows 11 as it seems. The primary environment for KMyMoney is Linux/KDE and there this problem does not appear AFAIK. There are some posts on this forum that explain how to possibly resolve the issue.

Yes, as I wrote I’m setting it to light mode with -platform: windows=dark-mode

@ipwizard

@michaelw

Finally, I noticed that transaction matching was unreliable

Transactions matching is based on the payee name. The same payee object can be identified by different values. Use the regex method of payee matching. I have the same problem with my own transactions where banks don’t provide my name but a more general text. Here are some of those entries:

This works very reliable!

Ok thanks!

While we are at it, there is one quirk that has been bugging me for a long time: when the last previous transaction for payee was a split, then kmm recreates this split on import, which almost always leads to garbage results.

It would be really great if we could turn off creating splits on import. I haven’t seen an instance where this made sense, and removing these splits is very tedious. It would be better to search back whether there is a non-split transaction for the same payee, or just leave it unassigned.

On the positive side, I love the tabbed ledger view, this makes work so much more efficient, not having to go back and forth via Home or the dropdown. And I also love that you can now change details in the Categories view, making Categories really first-rate accounts!

Thanks for the great work on this!

Michael

[michaelw]

Adding to the Detail on the ledger view: I just imported a statement without payee info, so none of the transactions are automatically categorized. In kmm 5.1.3, when the category was UNASSIGNED, the ledger automatically showed the Memo field content. Now I just see a long list of “Unassigned”, which is not very helpful. I have to press Ctrl-T to expand all, but the full view is more cluttered. So at least having the old behavior back would be good.

[ostroffjh]

There are memo fields for the transaction itself and for each split. The Details field seems to show the memos from the splits, but not the transaction memo.

[michaelw]

In any case, the one-row view looks like this:

Not very helpful (and as described above, extremely slow).

[ipwizard]

Are you sure that you are using a 5.2.x version here? That exclamation mark on yellow background only exists in 5.1.x at least I did not find any trace of it in the current source code. I am unable to duplicate that behavior in 5.2.x with 13 unassigned transactions.

[michaelw]

I am pretty sure - please see the screenshot:

And it’s easy to replicate: enter a new booking, just enter an amount and maybe a memo and nothing else. it will immediately show up as UNASSIGNED .

Should I file a bug report about this?

[ipwizard]

Which icon set do you use? I have standard breeze icons here and I just created 75 of those entries and scrolling is no problem at all.

[michaelw]

I’m not sure, I just use the standard kmm install on Windows and didn’t change anything. And I didn’t find any place where I could change the icon set…

Is there any way I can debug this? The icons are just a wild guess, it could be anything. But I’m pretty sure it happens when more unassigned/erroneous transactions are visible…

[michaelw]

If I may add two further issues here (if you want I can also start a new thread or file a report):

• can we have a setting to permanently enable the search bar? I use that so frequently that it is cumbersome to have to press Ctrl-F all the time
• Why do the transactions in the Category view not have Payees? I understand this is added on import, but mostly it seems only to the bank account, not to the category…

thanks!

[surcouf]

@michaelw

I’m not sure, I just use the standard kmm install on Windows and didn’t change anything. And I didn’t find any place where I could change the icon set…

Hello,

i don’t have windows so this might not be helpful.
on my computer, i can switch between icon sets in the Settings → Icons:

[ipwizard]

@surcouf the Icons pane does not exist on Windows

[surcouf]

@ostroffjh

The Details field seems to show the memos from the splits, but not the transaction memo.

I use KMyMoney Version 5.2.1-43e0ed6 (on Debian bookworm) and i can see boths memos (transaction + single splits of transaction). See lines 1, 2, 3 below:

[surcouf]

@ipwizard

the Icons pane does not exist on Windows

ups sorry for the useless contribution then, i was not aware.

[ipwizard]

No problem, you would only spot it by reading the source or running on Windows

[michaelw]

Well, but this is a special case, because you have more than 1 split!

I now tested with a transaction with 2 splits, and can reproduce what you see. Btw, you are not seeing the transaction-level Memo - I have no idea how to modify or display that except for looking at the new “Transaction details” (try changing the memo texts of all your splits and you will see the Transaction memo will never change and is never displayed).

So it seems if there is only 1 or 2 splits, then you get the other account as main line in the ledger view (which is UNASSIGNED if there is no other account, i.e., only 1 split in the transaction). If there are more than 2 splits, like in your case, then it shows the split of this account, and the other two in small font.

But this doesn’t solve the common case of having only 2 splits. I actually try to avoid having more than 2 splits as best as I can, as it makes management very difficult, and imports are a nightmare as I described elsewhere.

[surcouf]

ok, i misunderstood your words. It is a language issue on my side.
I understand a split as something splitted e.g. 150 € are split into 100 € + 50 € and you were saying split in the sens of “other side of the transaction in a double-entry booking system”, weren’t you?

the software is on your side, KMyMoney uses this wording split to name each “side” of a transaction (example: the side of the bank checking account and the side of the expense category)

.

Maybe it would have been better to have two distinct wordings (“split” for 150 = 100 + 50 and “booking” for “one side of the transaction”) to avoid issues, but anyway… it is too late , i am not english native speaker nor accountant.

to come back to your point: Memo texts.
I have tested all the cases:

1. One transaction, booked on bank account and on an expense
2. One transaction, booked on bank account and on an expense, split into two sub-amounts

in both cases, i saw the memo text in the ledger after creating the transaction and after having edited the memo text (see word CHANGE in screenshots) as well:

on the other side of the transaction (category Other expense:Unknown), i also see the memo text in the ledger:

Therefore i guess we are maybe not looking at the same place, or i misunderstand your wish.

[michaelw]

You are using the fully expanded view, therefore you always see all the details. Try pressing Ctrl-T, which is very useful for a condensed view. There, only the category/other account is shown, or “UNASSIGNED” if no other account exists.

Before, if there was no other account, the memo was shown by default. And in the condensed view, having a separate column for the “category” or “other account” is something I would find very useful.

Thanks for helping to get to the bottom of this!

[surcouf]

@michaelw

I actually try to avoid having more than 2 splits as best as I can, as it makes management very difficult, and imports are a nightmare as I described elsewhere.

I agree 100% on this.
What i don’t understand is, the “more than 2 splits” is reality-driven, it is not arbitrary, is it?

so, when i import my current account into KMyMoney, there are the same number of transactions as the one existing in my online banking website of the bank. There are per design no option to have “more than 2 splits”, are they?

in my way of using KMyMoney, i use “more than 2 splits” only for analytical purposes and i have three use cases:

1. I went to get some money out of the cash point. The full amount goes into category expenses:other. A few days / weeks later, i enter as splits of this transaction a few expenses i paid in cash (if i can book them to other categories and if i remember them )
2. I receive the monthly payment paid by the tenant of the flat i lease. The tenant pays one amount, and i split it in KMyMoney between Revenue:Lease:rent received and Revenue:Lease:utilities costs received. Since the amounts are the same every month, KMyMoney splits the paid amount into two sub-amounts automatically (since it recognizes the payee and the amount of the transaction, it applies the values of last months transactions), i have nothing to do
3. The monthly paiement of a mortgage reimbursement. Here all the work is done by KMyMoney (combination of loan account and scheduled transaction) → I am lucky again, no much work, i only control the amounts.