&Ace.Jones; &Ace.Jones.mail;
2011-07-3
4.6

# Importeren en exporteren

&Tony.Bloomfield; &Tony.Bloomfield.mail;

## GnuCash-importeerprogramma

### GnuCash-bestanden

The &kappname; GnuCash importer handles direct reading of standard (&XML;) files as produced by GnuCash versions 1.8 and 2.0. The following are not supported:

- importeren van gegevens uit een database (Postgres)

- importeren van 'multi-book'-bestanden

- importeren naar een bestaand bestand van &kappname;

- import of small-business specific features (Employees, Invoices, etc.)

- exporteren naar bestanden van GnuCash.

The import will probably only work correctly if presented with a valid file. It is recommended that the GnuCash Check & Repair All function (in the Actions menu) be run before attempting to import.

Files can be opened by specifying the filename on the command line (`kmymoney <path to file>`), or by means of the &kappname; &Ctrl;O File Open or File Import menu items.

The similarity between the two products means that much day-to-day data can be imported in a straightforward fashion. However, there are some areas where differences arise, and various options are provided to deal with these. The following sections will describe some of these differences; understanding them should lead to a smoother importation.

### Overeenkomsten, verschillen en terminologie

#### Gebruik in midden en klein bedrijf

It should be noted that &kappname; is a personal finance manager, and as such, does not directly support any of the business features of GnuCash, such as tax tables, payroll, and tracking of lots. Any Accounts Payable or Receivable accounts found in a file will be imported as Liability or Asset accounts respectively.

#### Rekeningen

##### Typen rekeningen

For both products, the highest level of structure in the file is the account. &kappname; supports 5 main types of account: Asset, Liability, Income, Expense and Equity, each of which may have various subtypes, &eg;, Checking, Credit Card, &etc;. &kappname; includes a 'standard' account for each of these five types, and all other accounts are held subordinate to one of these. &kappname; enforces more consistency (or less flexibility, depending on your point of view) between account types than does GnuCash, and the importer will correct any inconsistencies it detects. This may result in a slightly different account structure, though this can, within reason, be amended after the import is complete.

##### Categorieën

&kappname; uses the term Category to denote an account of an Income or Expense type. Unlike GnuCash, these are not considered as 'ledger' accounts, and entry of transactions folder into categories is not supported; allocations are made during transaction entry into other account types.

##### Structuur en plaatshouders

GnuCash supports the use of Placeholder accounts. In effect, these are just read-only accounts into which no transactions can be entered, but which function in an analogous fashion to folders in a folder structure, as a holder for other accounts. Though &kappname; does not support this feature as such, it does provide a parent/child account relationship, so the importer simulates placeholders by creating empty accounts.

##### Rekeningtype overeenkomst

GnuCash-type | &kappname;-type
--- | ---
BANK | Controleren
CONTROLEREN... | Controleren
SPAARREKENING | Spaarrekening
BEZIT | Bezit
KAS | Kas
VALUTA | Kas
MONEYMRKT | MoneyMarket
AANDEEL | Aandeel
MUTUAL | Aandeel
AANDEEL | Aandeel
VERPLICHTINGEN | Verplichtingen
KREDIET | Creditcard
INKOMEN | Inkomsten
UITGAVEN | Uitgaven
DEBITEUREN | Bezit
CREDITEUREN | Verplichtingen

#### Transactions and Splits

##### Balanced transactions

As with GnuCash, data is entered in the form of transactions, each generally consisting of 2 or more split entries. In fact, valid GnuCash transactions will always contain at least 2 splits, and to conform to GnuCash's double-entry bookkeeping standard, these must be in monetary balance (i.e., they must balance out to zero). &kappname; encourages, but does not enforce, this standard, but any imported transaction which is not balanced will be marked in the ledger view as having a problem.

##### Begunstigden

&kappname; prefers that all transactions have a Payee (a generic term that encompasses both payees and payers), and unlike GnuCash, a list of these payees is maintained. Payee names are generated by the importer from the GnuCash transaction's Description field.

##### Overboekingen

&kappname; uses the term Transfer to describe a transaction which does not involve a Category, but only transfers money between Asset and/or Liability accounts.

##### Transactie controle

&kappname; provides an account reconciliation function similar to that of GnuCash, and the corresponding transaction status will be imported.

#### Commodities

GnuCash uses the term Commodity to cover both currencies and non-currency assets. These are treated separately in &kappname;.

##### Valuta's

&kappname; has built-in support for all foreign currency types. &kappname; also requires that the user specify a base currency, this being the default currency for new accounts. The importer will attempt to determine the most likely base currency, though this choice may be rejected in favor of an alternative.

(NOTE: &kappname; does not currently support accounts denominated in 'defunct' currencies (except those replaced by the Euro). At present, it will be necessary to remove any such accounts from your GnuCash file before importing. We hope to improve on this situation in a future release.)

##### Securities and Investments

Non-currency assets (normally stocks and bonds) are called Securities by &kappname;, and represent the main difference between the two products, in that &kappname; requires any account denominated in a security to be subordinate to an Investment Account. This is described in more detail in the chapter on Investments. Though users may have implemented such a relationship, GnuCash imposes no defined structure on it, so the importer is unable to detect it and perform an automatic conversion. Three options are therefore made available:

- Create a separate Investment account for each security, with the same name as the security

- Create a single Investment account which will act as 'parent' for all security accounts

- Create several Investment accounts, and assign securities to them as directed by the user.

It depends entirely on user requirements which of these options is relevant in each situation, and in some cases, manual restructuring of accounts after importation may be necessary.

##### Prices and currency rates

Security prices and currency exchange rates as displayed in the GnuCash Price Editor will be imported. In addition, price and rate entries will be generated from all transactions involving securities and multiple currencies.

##### Online koersen

For obtaining online price and currency rate quotations, GnuCash uses a package called Finance::Quote. Recent versions of &kappname; contain support for this package for obtaining stock quotes, and this will be used by default when importing data. You may however select to convert to the native method used by &kappname; which is covered in more detail in online quotes.

If you choose to do so, the following dialog will allow selection of a 'native' &kappname; price source, or a user-defined source, for each account for which online quotes are required. However, the stock (ticker) symbol will be imported unchanged. Since this symbol will almost certainly be different in the two packages, it will need to be manually edited after completion of the import process. Future currency rate updates will not use Finance::Quote, and will always use the native retrieval method.

#### Periodieke Transacties

&kappname; does not retain the separation made in GnuCash between template transactions and their frequency of occurrence. Transaction data will be duplicated if the same template is used in different schedules, but this is not likely to be of great significance.

##### Schedule types

&kappname; classifies all schedules as one of three types, Bills, Deposits, or Transfers. Since GnuCash does not make such a distinction, the importer attempts to determine the classification from the accounts and direction of money movements. It may be that in some cases incorrect assumptions are made, and these will need manual correction.

##### Suspect Schedules

Some features of GnuCash scheduled transactions are not available in &kappname;, so the importer tries in each case to reach a reasonable compromise in converting the data. These transactions will be flagged as suspect, and the user will be given the option of editing them directly during the import process. Examples of situations which may cause this are:

- some frequency intervals supported in GnuCash are not currently available in &kappname;

- &kappname; does not support the use of formulae and variables in amount fields

- complex cases which have not yet been identified for import.

Despite best efforts, it is possible that, due to the many options involved, a scheduled transaction may cause a fatal error within &kappname;. If this sort of problem seems to be occurring, the importer offers the option to drop all suspect schedules.

#### Rapporten

&kappname; provides a comprehensive selection of configurable reports, described in more detail in Reports. These will not necessarily, however, match precisely those reports available in GnuCash.

### Selecting Importer Options

#### Investerings handeling

See "Securities and Investments" above.

#### Online koersen

Turn this off if you wish to use the native method for future online price quotes.

See "Online Quotes" above.

#### Periodieke Transacties

See "Scheduled Transactions" above.

#### Decoding Options

If your native language is written in letters or symbols which are different from those used in the 'Latin' languages (i.e., generally Western European), these are represented in a special fashion ('encoded') in your GnuCash file. If these letters are not displayed correctly on your screen, then they must be decoded. Currently, it is often not possible to detect accurately which form of decoding must be used, so you may need to set this option and select an entry from the list. In general, the first item in the list will be that which is considered appropriate for your locale (i.e., the country and language which was selected as native when your operating system was installed), so this should be tried first. Since the import process does not overwrite your GnuCash file, you are free to experiment with any of these selections.

#### Transaction Notes option

Under some usage conditions, non-split GnuCash transactions may contain residual, often incorrect, memo data which is not normally visible to the user. When imported into &kappname; however, due to display differences, this data can become visible. Often, these transactions will have a Notes field describing the real purpose of the transaction. If this option is selected, these notes, if present, will be used to override the extraneous memo data.

#### Debug Opties

These need only be used in the event of import problems. If you have such problems, you should also report them to the &kappname; developer list &devlist;. Note that the traces produced by these options may contain data of a confidential nature, and the Anonymize option should be used if they are to be made publicly available.

### Import Report

At the end of processing, the importer produces a report showing the number of different entities processed, and any errors or anomalies encountered. This report will be displayed on screen, and may be saved to a file for later review. A full report may contain the following sections:

- Record counts

- Inconsistencies in account types and actions taken

- Details of suspect schedules

&Thomas.Baumgart; &Thomas.Baumgart.mail;

## QIF Importer

### QIF format considered harmful

Generally speaking, the QIF format should be avoided wherever possible. It is a poor choice for transporting financial data. Among other things, QIF suffers from these problems:

- Lack of standardized format: Different versions of the same program will impart different meanings to the same element.

- Lack of transaction identifier: Because there is no ID number associated with each transaction, matching duplicate transactions is haphazard at best.

- Lack of expressiveness: The grammar is really simple, and cannot portray the depth of financial information found in today's financial environment.

This is generally why Intuit stopped supporting QIF input at all with Quicken 2005. If you have the option of getting data some other way, like OFX, always choose that option.

### How to import a QIF file

To import a QIF file, first ensure you have a valid &kappname; file open. Then select Import QIF... from the File menu.

The resulting dialog prompts for the QIF filename allowing you to locate the file by clicking on the Browse button.

Also, &kappname; differentiates between the import of a bank statement file and historic data exported from another application. The default is to import a bank statement file. In case you are importing data from your previous personal finance manager application select the appropriate option.

In general the default QIF profile should work with your QIF data. In some cases it might become necessary to use a modified QIF profile. See the next section for more details on that subject.

Click on Import to import the QIF file.

&kappname; will start scanning the file to determine the formats used to represent dates and numbers. In case it cannot determine a date format unambiguously, &kappname; will ask the user to select one from the list of possible date formats.

Next, &kappname; imports the data and creates all necessary objects, such as payee information, accounts and category records, and stock price information. Wherever possible, existing transactions will be matched against the imported information. A progress bar is shown and updated during the import process.

In case &kappname; could not detect the name of the account to be imported, the user will be asked to select the account into which the data should be imported. If the account does not already exist in your file, a new account can be created by clicking on Create.

At the end of the import, &kappname; shows a statement import statistics window.

Statement statistics Statement statistics

After importing, all of the imported transactions will be shown with a yellow background in the ledger view. In case &kappname; was able to match an imported transaction with an already existing transaction, the background is shown in light green.

The next step is to verify the imported data and accept it. This is a general process and also applies to imports from other sources. It is outlined in a separate section of this document.

The colors used to mark imported and matched transactions are customizable and may be different in your environment.

### Setting up a QIF profile

Because there is no universally standard format for a QIF file, different vendors have taken liberties with the format, and introduced their own nuances. The QIF Profile allows &kappname; to know about the peculiarities of your file. To edit an existing QIF Profile, or to create a new one, press the New button on the QIF Import dialog, near the profile selector.

QIF profiel editor

Previous versions of &kappname; used to have a tab for date and amount specifications. &kappname; now determines those settings by scanning the file. If it cannot figure out all settings, it will interrogate the user during import.

### Transactie vergelijking

As noted previously, one of the major drawbacks of the QIF format is the lack of a unique identifier for each transaction. Thus, if you import a QIF file and some of the transactions are already in your ledger, you may get duplicates. &kappname; attempts to get around this by looking for transactions that look similar to those you already have. If it finds something that looks like the same transaction, it will match the apparent duplicate.

This can be a problem if you have transactions that look too similar but are actually different. In this case, you can unmatch those transactions later in the ledger view.

### Writing an import filter

Sometimes you may have data in a custom format, like comma-separated-values (CSV) or something else unique to your situation. As of version 4.6, &kappname; includes a CSV Importer Plugin, but you can still import other types of files into &kappname; using a QIF Import Filter. A filter is a custom program you write which takes your special file as input, and produces a QIF file as output. This can be a shell script, a perl script, a compiled program written in C/C++, or anything else you can dream of, as long as the system can run it.

To use it, edit your favorite QIF Profile, and select the Filter tab. Enter the location of your filter program where prompted. Then, whenever you do a QIF import using this profile, the file you select for importing will be run through your filter first.

A common problem is to convert a list of comma-separated-values into a QIF file. This is a textbook case for the awk tool. Create a script called csv2qif.awk, with the following two lines as contents:

    BEGIN { FS=","; print "!Type:Bank" }

            { print "D"$1; print "T"$2; print "N"$3; print "P"$4; print "M"$5; print "^" }

Then, change the QIF keys (D,T,N,P,M) to match the order of your csv data. Set the input filter to `awk -f csv2qif.awk`.

Another problem sometimes arises in the encoding of QIF files. &kappname; expects files to be UTF8 encoded. If your file is encoded in something else, it can be useful to convert it to UTF8. For example to convert it from iso-8859-1, you would set the input filter to `recode iso-8859-1..utf-8`.

### Special &kappname; QIF extensions

As already mentioned, one of the major drawbacks of the QIF format is the lack of a unique identifier for each transaction. If you are writing your own QIF file creator (or filter, as described above), you can overcome this problem. &kappname; supports the '#' field. The importer will interpret this as a unique transaction ID, and disregard the record if the transaction is already in the system.

## QIF Exporter

To export one of your accounts to a QIF file, choose the Export QIF from the File menu. You will be prompted for which single account to export, what file to export it to, and what QIF Profile to use.

At the moment, QIF Exporter does not handle export of investments.

QIF Export

&Ace.Jones; &Ace.Jones.mail;
&Thomas.Baumgart; &Thomas.Baumgart.mail;

## OFX Importer Plugin

### Getting the plugin

&kappname; will import OFX files painlessly. However, this functionality is not built into the core program. You must obtain and install the OFX Importer Plugin. Once that is installed, the command to import OFX files will automatically show up under the File Import menu.

Note that many prepackaged versions of &kappname; were built with the OFX importer already included or available as a separate package. If the OFX importer does not seem to be installed in your version, the first place to check is in the same place you got your base &kappname; package.

If you have installed from RPM, the OFX Importer Plugin is contained within the kmymoney-ofx RPM. It should be available from whatever source you got the base &kappname; RPM. If you have built from sources, all you need to do is have preferably the libOFX 0.9 development headers and libraries installed on your system. The &kappname; build process will detect these and compile the plugin. At the time of release of &kappname; 4.6, the latest libofx version was 0.9.4, which is also the minimum required version.

Should you run into trouble trying to compile &kappname;, and you are certain you have the correct version of libOFX installed, please contact the developers list &devlist; for assistance. Include a copy of your config.log file, compressed first via gzip.

### Importing an OFX file

The most basic way to import an OFX file is to choose the importer from the menu bar. From the File menu, choose Import, and then OFX.... If OFX does not show up under Import, you do not have the OFX Importer Plugin installed correctly. Please see the previous section.

The first thing the importer will do is ask you into which account to import the transactions. If there are transactions from multiple accounts in your file, you will be asked this question multiple times.

After importing, some of your transactions may be shown with an exclamation mark on a yellow triangle in the ledger. This is because they need to be assigned a category. The importer was not able to automatically assign a category based on your past transaction history. You can edit each transaction in the ledger to assign a category, and the mark will be removed.

Please note that this section describes the native OFX importer. OFX files may also be imported using the AqBanking Importer Plugin if you have installed that. Note that the two importers do behave slightly differently, and they are written and supported by two different developers.

### Importing Investments

Please note that if you are importing a file with investment transactions, those investments must first exist in your &kappname; file. The trading symbol is used to match, so please ensure that the symbol in &kappname; is exactly the same as the one in the file you're importing.

### Web Connect

The easiest way to import an OFX file is to set up Web Connect. Visit your bank's web site, and click on a link to download an OFX file. Your browser should ask you what program you would like to use to open the program. Point your browser to &kappname;. It will then import the downloaded OFX file into the &kappname; file you most recently had open. You can also change the file associations of your desktop environment, and have &kappname; open the OFX file automatically for you.

If you need to import the OFX file into some other &kappname; file, load up that file in &kappname; first, and then visit your bank's web site.

### Direct Connect

OFX Direct Connect is now supported in &kappname;. This gives you the ability to contact your bank directly to obtain statements. In the future, there will be more help written, and this will be moved to its own section.

To enable this feature, you must compile &kappname; with the --enable-ofxbanking switch (now the default).

Please be warned: Many banks require a separate signup, will give you a separate password or PIN, and may even charge you a separate fee for this service. No bank directly supports &kappname;. You will have to tell them you want to bank directly from MS Money or Quicken.

The first step is to configure each account for which you wish to download statements. Go to the Accounts view, right click on the account you wish to configure, and choose Map to online account.... In case more than one online banking plugin is installed on your system you will be asked which one to use. For the internal OFX method select KMyMoney OFX. A list of banks will be downloaded from the Internet and a wizard will guide you through choosing a bank, entering your username and password, and selecting an account. Should you find that your bank is not listed, then it may still be possible to use the manual option. Your bank may be able to provide the required parameters, or you may have to do some research to find them.

Once you have an account set up with online banking, go to the ledger for that account. Then from the Account menu, choose Update account.... This will connect to your bank, and download a statement for the last 60 days.

In version of &kappname; prior to 4.6, the payee name was always taken from the PAYEEID field. As of version 4.6, the payee name can be based on either the PAYEEID, NAME, or MEMO field in the OFX transaction. You can configure this feature and some other OFX direct connect settings by selecting the appropriate tab in the Edit account dialog.

### Exporting an OFX file

It is not possible to export your data as an OFX file currently. If you are interested to contribute in this area, please contact the libofx development team for details.

&Allan.Anderson; &Allan.Anderson.mail;

## CSV Importer Plugin

### Reasons for importing CSV Files

In general, it is preferable to import OFX. However, not all institutions provide data in that format. CSV (comma separated value) files are almost always available (sometimes described as Excel or spreadsheet.) Also, they can often be created fairly easily by capturing the data you want to import, such as in a text file, and manually editing it.

The primary focus of the plugin is on importing data from bank statements, but there is also a capability to import some investment statements. In addition, it retains its initial ability to produce QIF files from CSV.

### Getting the plugin

&kappname; will import CSV (comma separated values) files. However, this functionality is not built into the core program, although the source is now provided as part of the &kappname; tarball, which needs to be installed. Once that is done, the command to import CSV files will automatically show up under the File Import menu.

The CSV importer plugin is much newer than the OFX plugin, so it may take some time until many prepackaged versions of &kappname; are built with the CSV importer already included or available as a separate package. Ensure that it is enabled within &kappname;. Check the Settings Configure KMyMoneyPlugins menu. If the CSV importer does not seem to be installed in your version, the first place to check is in the same place you got your base &kappname; package.

If you have installed from RPM, the CSV Importer Plugin may be contained within the kmymoney-csv RPM. It should be available from whatever source you got the base &kappname; RPM. If you have built from sources, there should be no additional requirements. The &kappname; build process should detect the plugin source and compile the plugin.

Should you run into trouble trying to compile &kappname;, and you are certain you have the plugin source available, please contact the developers list &devlist; for assistance. Include a copy of your config.log file, compressed first via gzip.

### Importeren van een CSV-bestand

To import a CSV file, choose the importer from the menu bar: File ImportCSV.... If CSV does not show up under Import, you do not have the CSV Importer Plugin installed correctly. Please see the previous section.

The CSV Importer window has three main sections.

- The upper left area has three tabs, Banking, Investment, and Settings. Because of differences in processing banking and investment data, you need to indicate which type of data you are importing before you select the file. You do this by clicking on either the Banking or Investment tab. The selected tab is indicated by a "*" after the label, as a reminder in case you accidentally click the wrong tab. If later you select the other tab, the plugin warns you that you will lose your current settings, and gives you an option to cancel the switch. All three tabs are described in more detail below.

- The lower section of the window displays the contents of the csv file currently being imported.

- The upper right area contains some buttons for controlling the import process.

  #### Bestand openen

  This is used to select the file to import. As noted above, the file will be imported as either banking or investment data, as indicated by which tab is marked with an asterisk ("*").

  #### Importeren

  This tells the plugin to actually import the data from the file, based on the choices you have made on the Banking or Investment tab and on the Settings tab, all as described below. &kappname; will prompt you for the correct account into which to import the data.

  #### Save as QIF

  This button gives you the ability, after the import has been completed, to save the data from the csv file as a qif file, should you require one for any reason.

  #### Afsluiten

  Closes the plugin, after saving your settings.

  #### Selecties wissen

  Clear all the columns and settings you have chosen or adjusted.

Importing a CSV file is a multi-step process. Not all steps will always be necessary, and the exact order of these steps depends on the specifics of the data being imported.

1. Choose whether you are importing banking or investment data.

2. Open the file containing the data.

3. Confirm the field delimiter, and possibly the text delimiter, and set the starting and ending lines to be imported.

4. Assign which fields or columns contain particular types of data relevant to the import type.

5. Confirm or adjust settings such as date format and decimal.

6. Confirm the import.

Once you have selected the Banking or Investment tab, click the Open File button, and select your input csv file. Before actually proceeding with the import of the file, you need to give &kappname; some details about the layout of the file, which differs depending on whether the file contains banking or investment data. First, however, you may need to adjust some settings common to both file types.

#### CSV Importer Plugin Settings

Select the Settings tab on the importer window. Here you configure a number of fields that allows the plugin to correctly interpret your input file. In general, this is done after you indicate whether you are importing banking or investment data and you have opened the file, but you may need first to correct the field delimiter if the display is obviously incorrect. Then assign specific fields to columns. Note that this information is saved, so you will only need to set or confirm it once, unless you are importing a csv file created with different settings. In addition, some of the settings may already be correct, based on your current locale setting.

##### Veldscheidingsteken

Even though the file is still called comma delimited, the character used to separate values in the file may be a comma, semicolon, or tab. Once this is set correctly, your data should appear correctly split into fields.

##### Text Delimiter

This will usually be a single or double quote character. It is important in case the field delimiter character appears within a column, such as the memo field.

Once the fields are correctly displayed, you have to tell the plugin about the column layout of the input file, which you do on the Banking or Investment tab, as appropriate. Note that you can switch between the data type tab and the settings tab without losing any data. On the Banking or Investment tab, if you make a mistake when entering column numbers, just re-enter the correct column number. Alternatively, click Clear selections to clear all the selections and try again.

##### Scheidingsteken Decimalen

For each import, after the fields have been selected, the decimal symbol should now be selected, as it triggers a validation process on your monetary column choices in the Banking or Investment tab. Set the Decimal Symbol to match those in your file, not your locale. If your locale setting has a different value, conversion will be seen to take place. In the display of the file in the lower part of the window, numeric fields are highlighted to show in green if this setting produces valid results, otherwise in red. The highlighting also reflects the start and end lines settings (see below). There could be warnings if any of the selected cells appear not to contain the selected symbol.

##### Thousands Symbol

This does not need to be selected, as it is set automatically based on the Decimal Symbol. It is provided purely as a guide.

##### Datumopmaak

This needs to be set according to the order of year, month, and day in any dates in the file. If the plugin finds data incompatible with this setting, it will complain when you try to import. However, if the setting is wrong, but doesn't produce invalid results (such as data with no days higher than 12, so month and day could be confused) you will simply get incorrect data, because the plugin cannot know you made a mistake, but the error will be obvious in the ledger after import.

##### Start line

Set this so the importer skips any header lines in the file.

##### End line

The importer will automatically set this to the last line in the file. You will only need to adjust it if there are footer lines in the file the importer should ignore. Otherwise, you are likely to get a data error warning.

#### Gegevens van de bank importeren

Importing banking data is fairly straightforward, you just need to select the appropriate column numbers, which is done on the Banking tab.

- If your file has just a single column for the amount, click the Amount column radio button, and enter the appropriate column number in the Amount dropdown.

- If there are two columns - debit and credit - click the Debit / credit columns radio button, and enter the appropriate column numbers in the Debits and Credits dropdowns.

- If you wish to save the values from more than one column in the memo field, just select those columns sequentially. An asterisk appears against the selected choices, as a reminder.

- The plugin detects attempts to select the same column for two different fields. Because it cannot know which one is correct, it will output an error message and clear both selections.

Once you are happy with the settings and column selection, you can import the file, as described further below.

#### Importing investment data

To import investment data, click the Investment tab. The procedure is similar to the above.

- Select the column which contains the Date of the transaction.

- Select the column which contains the Price. The Price Fraction setting is for matching the imported pricing units with the existing pricing, where for instance one is in $ and the other in cents, or £ versus pence, etc. For example, if your &kappname; data file pricing is in dollars, and so is the CSV file, then set Price Fraction to 1.0. If however, the CSV file pricing is in cents, set the fraction to 0.01.

- The Type/Action column is where the activity is described: buy, sell, reinvest, etc.

- Select the column which contains the Quantity or number of shares of the transaction.

- Assign a Fee Column according to whether any fee is involved, and click the Fee is Percentage box if the imported fee is a percentage rather than a value. (Just a warning here. It may be that the fee has been taken into account in the unit price. If so, don't select any fee column, although any fee shown may be retained by selecting the fee column as another memo column.)

- As with banking data, the Memo field can be used to select more than one column (sequentially) to include multiple values in the memo field of the imported transaction.

- Select the column which contains the Amount.

- Enter the name of the security in the Security Name field, ensuring it matches exactly the existing security as specified in &kappname;. If the security name appears in the imported file, double click on it to select it, then copy and paste/edit to match, taking care if you have used a variation or abbreviation within &kappname;. As you enter security names in this field, they are retained in the resource file (see below for more details on this file.) This means they will be available in this dropdown when you run the plugin the next time. If you wish, you can also edit the resource file to add a complete list of securities you expect to encounter in your import files. If you have entered a name incorrectly, click the Hide Security button. This just removes the name from the plugin list and has no effect on your data in &kappname;.

  Because of the lack of standardization of formats, the current version of the plugin is restricted to importing data for one security in one account at a time. If your file contains data for more than one security, you can import it in stages, using the start line and end line to identify only one at a time.

#### Completing the import

For either banking or investment data, once you have selected all the appropriate columns, click Import. &kappname; will now display a selector dialog box for you to choose the correct account into which to import the data. It is possible at this stage to save to a qif file, should you require one for any reason, by clicking Save as QIF.

For investment data, if any transaction involves another account, &eg;, a checking or brokerage account for a received dividend or for making a payment, a message box will pop up for the account name to be entered for the transfer. If the investment account allows for, say, writing checks, you may enter an existing checking/brokerage account name. Similarly enter the column number containing the payee, if requested. If a mistake is made when entering the account name, the import will go ahead, but &kappname; will not recognize it, and will flag those transactions as missing a category assignment. If the required account name is rather long, just enter a few characters. The import will proceed but the transactions will be flagged by &kappname; as missing a category assignment, and the correct transfer account will need to be selected.

If, during import of a transaction, the plugin finds no valid transaction type, it will display the offending transaction, and the user may select a valid type to substitute, depending on the combination of quantity, price, and amount values. For every transaction, the plugin will validate the column contents to ensure they match the action type. For instance, if a quantity appears but no price or amount, it is assumed that the transaction can be only an add or remove shares. Or, if there is an amount but no quantity or price, then a Dividend is assumed, etc..

If you find that your investment statements keep including activity types that are not recognized, just add them to the section in the resource file. (See below for more details on this file. For instance, in the [InvestmentSettings] section of the file, the BuyParam field includes entries for Purchase, Buy, New Inv, and Switch In. If you find a different one, add it to the correct list and restart the plugin. You may notice that there are similarities in the entries in different fields, and you may find that the wrong activity type is being selected. The plugin checks these lists in the following order: Shrsin, DivX, Reinvdiv, Brokerage, Buy, Sell, Remove. Re-ordering the lists to suit this does not work as might be expected, since the entries in the resource file get sorted into alphabetical order. If the offending parameter is one you don't need, just delete it from the file. If that is not possible, you may need to edit your file before input.

Note that it may appear that the displayed entries in the lower section of the plugin window may be edited, and in fact they may, but the edits are not kept. The display is purely for display, not for editing. The input file is never altered by the plugin, and the data actually imported comes from the input file, not from the display.

#### Configuration of CSV importer plugin

A well-known drawback of QIF format is that it is a fairly loose format. With CSV files, there is this same problem, only more so, in that there is no agreed standard at all. With investment files, in particular, there is much more scope for variation in specifying the different types of activities represented in the data. The plugin handles this by listing these activity types in a resource file, called csvimporterrc. The location of this file depends on your distribution. It will usually be located in ~/.kde4/share/config/, but may be in ~/.kde/... instead. Using this resource file allows the user to add an activity type that the developer had not encountered. If the file does not exist when the importer first runs, the plugin will create a default version, containing a few of the more obvious descriptions.

A number of sample csv files are provided (in the kmymoney/contrib/csvimporter/ folder in the source tree) in the hope that they may help. For example, in the investment sample, an activity type is "ReInvestorContract Buy : ReInvested Units". In the validation process, the first successful match is on the ReInv in ReInvestorContract Buy, so the transaction therefore gets classed as Reinvdiv, even though Buy also is mentioned. Another example which has been observed is an activity type of Reinvest even though the transaction included neither price nor amount, but only a quantity, so that needed to be treated as Add Shares, or Shrsin.

When this plugin was created, only a few investment formats had been seen as examples, and it may well be that you will encounter one which cannot be handled correctly. If you find such a file, please send a suitable example (edited to remove or replace personal information) to the &kappname; user list &userlist; or developer list &devlist;, the developer will do his best to modify the plugin to handle it.

## Writing Importer Plugins

&kappname; contains explicit support for importer plugins. If you have a custom format, and you would like to write an importer plugin, we would value your contribution. To do so, you'll need to compile the program from source. Then use the OFX Importer Plugin as an example.