Unlike my other questions, following on from my “Skrooge newbie: introduction” post (can’t link? mostly background info, not really necessary to read), this is maybe a bit more of a discussion than a straight forward question…
I’m importing 28+ years of financial history from MS Money. This includes over 28,000 transactions, 131 accounts, 56 Units (shares, currencies etc) and 300 Categories.
In MS Money, the category list is hierarchical (like it is in Skrooge), but it is also divided into two at the highest level - EXPENSE and INCOME.
In the EXPENSE branch, there are (sub-)categories like Bills, Car, Clothing etc and INCOME has Investment Income, Wages & Salary etc
“In” and “Out” Transactions in MS Money are entered and displayed separately (although it appears they are simply held internally as +/- amounts).
The “In” and “Out” name depends on the account type…
Cash/Wallet - Receive + Spend
Credit Card - Credit + Charge
Savings/Current - Deposit + Withdrawal
… and usually “In” transactions will have a category from the INCOME branch and “Out” transactions from the EXPENSE branch.
MS Money warns if you try to use an “incorrect” category (e.g. Receive a sum into a cash account with a Car (expense) category), but allows it - typically it’s needed for a refund.
The EXPENSE and INCOME split is also used in reports that include categories, so that expense and income categories are grouped and summed separately.
Otherwise, the EXPENSE and INCOME level of the tree is hidden, in particular, transactions only show the “Car > Fuel” bit of the category, just like Skrooge does with the default category list.
However, when importing from MS Money to Skrooge, the EXPENSE and INCOME level is imported too, which results in a bit of a confused category list in Skrooge.
If the default Skrooge categories are present in the document before the import, then EXPENSE and INCOME appear alongside the Skrooge top level categories (Bills, Car, Clothing etc) and all the categories are duplicated e.g. “Bills” at the top level (but empty) as well as under EXPENSE (with transactions).
When importing from MS Money now, I start with a new Skrooge document, delete the unused Skrooge Categories (all of them!) and then Import.
That results in no duplicates, but it results in three levels of categories that all show up in transactions e.g. EXPENSE > Car > Fuel
Might it be better for the Skrooge MS Money importer to ignore the top level of the MS Money category (EXPENSE/INCOME) so that it only results in a two level category tree, rather than three?
After all, the 3-level is the MS Money way of doing it and it’s different to the way that Skrooge does it with it’s 2-level tree.
Conceptually, shouldn’t the import convert from the MS-Money “representation”/“way of working” to the Skrooge “representation”/“way of working”?
(Or maybe Skrooge could change to a default of three levels of category too?)
I can’t decide.
On one hand I kind of like the idea of having a split between income and expense categories (in reports for instance) but on the other, I also like the simplicity of a two level category (Car > Fuel) rather than the clutter of 3 levels (EXPENSE > Car > Fuel).
I can’t quite decide which I like more though!
Has this been considered before? Was it a conscious design decision to import all three category levels from MS Money, or is it just because “that’s what’s there”?
(btw, I’m glad Skrooge makes it easy to rename “EXPENSE” to “Expense” after importing - there’s really no need to shout…)