Statement View Usage

Introduction

PalOMoney Statement view is a list based window that displays the open statement transaction items in your Money file. These transaction items have been imported into Money, but you have not "accepted" them in your account registers. The Statement view list window displays all open statement items, whether imported directly using Money, or downloaded by PalOMoney or another program.

Only the transaction based statement items are shown here: ofx import contain additional information, such as your security positions, available balance and credit, etc., that are not transactions. Those entries are not transactions, and are stored in Money database another table, and are not displayed in the transaction list.

As you accept the transactions in Money, they will disappear from the list, when refreshed. Accordingly, these are not necessarily your most recent transactions, but rather the most recent transactions you have not examined and accepted. This concept is in itself useful to monitor spending by yourself and others with access to your accounts. If you sort the list be inverse date order (newest on top), you can keep track of what's happening in your financial life.

Account Settings

Statement view contains controls to set up and download all your accounts directly from the financial institutions using so-called "Direct Connect" OFX download. Accounts are set up using the Account Connection Service dialog launched from the Statement view Online Connection Settings command, a small button (...) to the right of the bottom Account selector. This dialog and its accompanying dialogs are "advanced" settings. In this context "advanced" really means "primitive" in that all of the responsibility of getting the settings correct lies with the user. A planned future enhancement is to make account setup simpler, like the original Money wizards.

Downloading Statements

The download scheduler and background downloading are not implemented in this release, so the Update Now command is used to download all accounts set up for downloading. (Accounts can be individually downloaded using the Account Connection Service dialog Update command.) All downloaded statements plus a log file are saved in your MnyUpdates (soon to be Import) folder.

Once a statement is downloaded, it must be imported into Money. PalOMoney offers a multitude of methods for how to process or examine the downloaded statement file.

By far, the most important method is called Money Queue, which copies the downloaded .ofx files to a temp folder, and adds them to Money's Import File queue, and notifies Money if it is running to process the queue. This is by far the smoothest interface to Money, because it bypasses the Money shell handler, which requires clicking Ok for each download. Along with the included SayOk app, which can optionally wait for the annoying Money "Import a file" dialog and dismiss it for you.

Usage

To use Statement View:

• Open your Money file.
• If a Statement view window does not open, select Window | Statement Window to open a Statement view window.
  • Optionally, you can use File | Options and check Statements to automatically open a Statement view window when opening a Money file.
• Observe a list of open statement transaction items. Click a column header to sort the list. Multi-column sorting is supported.
• The top Accounts list selects All Accounts or a specific account.
  • The Accounts selectors (there is one on the bottom) are controlled by the Accounts Filter buttons to the right. These buttons have three states: Ignore, Off, and On.
  • Typically, filtering the list by account is rarely needed because there are usually not so many statement items as to make the list unwieldy.
• Hit the Online Connection Settings command, a small button (...) next to the bottom Account selector, to launch the Account Connection Service dialog to set up your accounts for statement downloads.
• You can get a list of download service connections by hitting the button (...) next to the Update Method selector. Each account is listed followed by connection services for that account. There should be at least an OFX500File_Import provider method for each account.
• After one or more accounts are set up for online downloads, you can download all such accounts by selecting a processing method in the Update Method selector, and clicking Update Now. Depending on the selected method, the downloaded files will be imported into Money, or opened for examination, etc.

Getting Money Account Settings Right

First, read the help file topics for the settings dialogs to see what the controls are. The Money database uses four different lists (or tables) to store information related to online downloads.

• The Financial Institution list stores information about financial institutions.
• The Accounts list stores account names and their related financial institutions.
• The Providers-Login list stores information about an OFX or other download account at a financial institution, or a third party vendor that provides your information from your financial institution. This list has the web address for OFX queries, plus your provider user name and encrypted password. Money could use a lot of different providers.
  • If you handle accounts for another owner, you may have more than one provider login per financial institution. You can name their provider login using their name or initials to keep things straight.
• The Connection Service list stores information that identifies a specific account to a specific provider. This list contains account, bank, and broker ID numbers.

Take some time to think about this schema. ... ...

Ok. For each account, you will need to do the following:

First, export your current settings so you can revert.

• In the Account Connection Service dialog, press Export to save your settings for later restoration or transfer.

Set up the Provider Information

• Obtain the Provider login account information. This very well may use a different user name and password than you use on your financial institution's web site.
  • You may have to call your FI and ask for OFX Direct Connect access (you can tell them you are using Quicken (or GnuCash, which should be royalty-free) to keep them happy). Use whatever means at your disposal to avoid them charging you a fee for this service.
• Open the the Provider Login dialog to display provider logins, and look for your provider login.
• If the provider login is not already in the Money database, add it and enter the information.
  • Optionally use the Find Provider Connection Information button to search for your provider. It IS in version 1.0.5]
• Enter the information.
• Press the Get Capabilities button to call the provider and fill out the various Services (aka capabilities) controls. These controls should match what your provider provides, but some providers do not support downloading this information, so you may wish to manually enter the appropriate services.
• Use the List User Accounts button to call the provider and download a list of the user account numbers and identifiers available through this provider login. You will use this list later to set up connection services for each account.
  • A few institutions do not support List User Accounts, a capability shown in the "Provider" capabilities control as "LA" if supported or "la" if not.
• Check the Internet button if you wish to enable this provider for downloads.

Set up the Connection Service Information You will be updating or creating a new Connection Service record to link an account with a provider.

• Select the account in the Account Selector.
  • If the account does not appear, fiddle with the account filters until it does. You can adjust the filtering attributes on this dialog.
• In the Connection Provider Login control, select the provider you entered.
  • If the provider does not appear in this control, it is associated with another financial institution. Hit Settings to open the Provider Login dialog, find the provider, and set the financial institution to match your account, or check "Multi Institution" to allow it to be available for all financial institutions.
• The controls below will either be grey or populated. Populated controls indicate an existing record, otherwise hit Create to create a new connection service record.
• Edit the record, adding your account number, either the Bank ID or Broker ID, etc. Set the Online Service and Service Types appropriately (see below). Wonder at the multitude of choices here.
• Make sure the account Online button is checked.
• Hit Update to test the settings. It will download and import a statement using the connection. There are several options of using Shift, Ctrl, and Alt when pressing the mouse button.
• Once that is working, you can repeat for all your other accounts.

Exporting and Importing

If you have PalOMoney working on a backup file, and wish to import your settings into your real file, export the settings from the backup file and import them into your new file.

• In the Account Connection Service dialog, press Export to save your settings for later restoration or transfer.
• Copy the file to another machine or folder, or whatever.
• Open the real file.
• In the Account Connection Service dialog, press Import to find and load your settings from the other file.
• In the Import Standard Connection Services and Providers dialog, observe the checked entries to be imported. You can import any and all of these entries, plus the settings for entries that are not checked (because they existed in both Money files).

More Later.