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 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.
• 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:

• Obtain the Provider login account information. This may use a different user name and password than you use on your financial institution's web site.