On 2013.04.13 13:20, TIm Dawson wrote:
One of the most basic features that I would have assumed would have
been a "gimme" in any financial management package that can be
utilized in conjunction with a financial organization (IE, can upload
transactions from a bank) would be the ability to actually schedule
those uploads to happen *WITHOUT* any user intervention. Either I am
totally blind, or in the 5+ years that I have been using KMymoney,
this feature has been painfully and notably absent.
Perhaps it's just my patterns as a user, in that I don't necessarily
reconcile my accounts monthly (more like quarterly, unless there is
an issue) and what happens is that Chase only keeps 30 days of online
transactions uploadable, so inevitably, I spend way too much time
hand entering stuff that should have been uploaded. Barring my
remembering to do this on a periodic basis (which is an absurd
requirement . . .) a mechanism to schedule this via cron (or other
process scheduler) to run *WITHOUT* user intervention would appear to
be an obvious need - and need not be anything more sophisicated than
a command line option such that kmymoney can be run such as "kmymoney
--update-all" and have an OFX update occur, the same as if update-all
was selected from the gui, but with no intervention, and no need to
load the gui to a desktop.
Seems like all the parts are there . . . again, I can't fathom why
this isn't available (or have managed to miss it for years . . . ).
Tim,
I don't think you have missed anything, although I don't see the
absense of this feature to be either painful or notable. However, to
make sure it does not get forgotten, you can open a ticket at
bugs.kde.org, using the severity of "wishlist."
As for whether it's simple and essential or not - that's up for
debate. Personally, I prefer to download transactions more frequently,
and interactively, so I can assure correct matching of payees and
categories. Also, if there were a command line option that could be
scheduled with cron, it would mean that the password to the OFX
account would need to be available. That may or may not be an issue
for you - but it likely is for some people. I have my passwords stored
in kwallet, and the first time it is accessed in any session, it
requires me to enter my password to open the wallet. If you remove the
requirement for a password to the wallet, some people would consider
that a security issue. I know KMM can store the password itself, but
some don't consider that sufficiently secure. Yes - KMM could have the
feature, and the paranoid among us could keep the password on kwallet
and just not use the feature, but this leads to a second point (as has
been pointed out on this list) developer time is somewhat limited, and
all the developers are volunteers. They add features and fix bugs
because they want to, not because someone says it is essential.
As a short term workaround - you could have cron send you a message
reminding you to download your transaction.
Jack
_______________________________________________
KMyMoney-devel mailing list
KMyMoney-devel@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kmymoney-devel
