KMyMoney: 0.9 released

KMyMoney is the Personal Finance Manager for KDE. It operates similar to MS-Money and Quicken, supports different account types, categorisation of expenses, QIF import/export, multiple currencies and initial online banking support.

The KMyMoney development team is pleased to announce a major step forward for what has been described as "the easiest personal money tool out there", with the first public availability of a new development release, version 0.9. This offers many new features and improvements over the existing, stable, 0.8 series; see below for just some of these.

It should be emphasised however that this is a development release, and as such some of the newer
features may not be fully functional. Releases like this are also termed 'unstable', so as such,
it is advisable when using it to ensure that you maintain frequent backups of your files,
including your current (version 0.8) file. That being said, most of the developers themselves have,
of course, been entrusting their own data to this new release for some time!

One aspect which (as is not uncommon for open source software) is particularly lacking
is up-to-date documentation. Be assured that we are working on this aspect, and any offers
of help will be appreciated. Now for the good news.

New Features
------------

- Charts. Many of the reports produced by KMyMoney may now be displayed in chart form. Line, bar,
stacked bar, pie & ring charts are supported where appropriate.

- Budgets. A new budget feature allows you to specify your future expectations of income and expenditure,
and then to compare your actual performance against these. You can use your historical data to
have KMyMoney create a basic budget for you. Budget reports can be displayed as charts if desired.
Monthly budget overruns can be displayed on your home page, but can be removed if you find it
too depressing.

- Forecasts. A forecast can be produced of the future balances of your critical accounts,
based either on regular scheduled transactions or your historical data. (Sadly, we are unable
to accurately predict the future value of your investments!). Forecast charts based
on historical data are under development.

Major Enhancements
------------------

Many enhancements have been made to existing functionality, to improve your user experience.
Among the foremost of these are the following:

- New 'wizards' have been produced to simplify the setting up of new accounts, and complicated
situations such as loans and mortgages. One wizard in particular will guide first time users
through the setting up of their new file, and template lists of frequently-used accounts
and categories are supplied, often tailored to nationality.

- Several new options have been provided to enable you to configure KMyMoney to your personal requirements.

- Defunct accounts may now be marked as closed, so that they no longer clutter up your screens,
though they are still available for viewing if required.

- The views of the various ledgers have been revamped to provide better performance, and more
facilities for sorting and searching transactions, including a 'quick search' option.
A new multiple transaction selection function will allow you to do some 'bulk' changing of transactions.

- A new, more comprehensive, transaction autofill facility, based on payee name, has been introduced.

- Deletion of 'non-empty' payees and categories is now allowed, with the transactions
being re-assigned as required.

- Changes have been made to simplify the entry and maintenance of your regular scheduled transactions.

- Some new reports have been added, new levels of detail have been included, and many of them
have also been made more configurable. There are also been a number of fixes related to
multi-currency reports.

- Warning messages can be displayed if the balance on an account exceeds, or falls below, a given value.

- A summary of all your accounts can be seen in the home page, including current net worth,
income and expenses, and the total scheduled income and expenses for current month.

- If you use OFX or HBCI for online banking, your setup has been made easier, and a manual
transaction matching facility should simplify reconciliation of your downloaded
statements. There is support for new versions of AqBanking and libofx, providing more
flexibility and reliability.

- And, not least of all, new artwork and cosmetic enhancements may make your usage
of the product easier and, we hope, more pleasurable.

Coming along
------------

Work on provision of the ability to store your financial data in one of the popular relational databases
is in an advanced state. It was only withheld from this release pending some performance improvements.

As mentioned above, work on providing more comprehensive budgetting and forecasting features is also under way.

Translations
------------

Some translations of some of the texts and messages used in this release into languages other
than English are already available. See the 'Help make a translation' link at
http://kmymoney2.sourceforge.net/index-devel.html for details of progress on this.
(The status of this release will be roughly similar to that of HEAD.)

If you have some fluency in any of the languages which are not yet translated, or which have
a low percentage of completion, your help would be welcomed. No great technical expertise is
required, though a knowledge of personal finance terminology would obviously be useful. Initial
contact should be made to the developer mailing list, see below.

Technical Issues
----------------

This release is still dependent on versions 3 of the KDE Desktop Environment and the Qt toolkit.
Though it has been known to work in a KDE4 environment, the development (for building from source code)
and runtime versions of these products must also be installed.

Some caveats
------------

Once you have updated your file and saved it under the new release, it may still be possible
to read it under the older, 0.8, versions, but this is not guaranteed. Hence the warning above,
to preserve a backup of your current file.

If you are currently running a 0.8 version of this product which you built from source code ('cvs'),
it is highly advisable to uninstall it ('make uninstall', 'make clean') before installing this release.

Bugs and Problems
-----------------

We are eager for as many people as possible to help us by reporting any problems or bugs
which may be encountered in this release. Please report them either to the developer mailing list at
kmymoney2-developer@lists.sourceforge.net, or via the 'Report a bug' link at http://kmymoney2.sourceforge.net/index-devel.html.

The developer list can also be used for any offers of help in documentation, translation or programming.

We thank you all for your support.