KMyMoney 0.9 released

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-5NWGOfrQmneRv+LV9MX5uipxlwaOVQ5f@public.gmane.org, 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.

-- 

Cheers,
TonyB

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