The Account is meant to hold funds and savings that you have or that you plan to spend. Each account can have certain starting balance and list of transactions, which is related to this account.
Accounts can be created with different purposes. Those might be:
In other words the Account is not only the way to keep your money, but to distinguish ones as well..
Each Account in Personal Ledger has its own currency. A Transaction can be processed to account at any currency. Auto conversion in this case will be applied at most appropriate exchange rate on transaction date.
Account has an attributes such as "Starting balance" and "Current Balance". The Starting Balance keeps the initial money value which was defined at creation of an account. After creation Starting Balance is automatically added to all transactions of an account. Current balance shows the amount of money left on an account. Both attributes are represented in the account currency.
Personal Ledger is a multi-currency finance management system. You can use as many currencies as you like. If you can not find certain currency on the list, than you can create your own, using the name and 3 sign code as for example RUB or USD. This code helps updating currency from the Internet and showing data neat in some cases.
You can choose the currency of transaction on creation or on editing (the currency of an account that transaction is dealing with will be set by default). If that currency will differ from the account currency, than automatic conversion will be applied to all reports and other final calculations of the current account, using the most appropriate exchange rate on the date of transaction.
Currency exchange rates can be updated from the Internet or manually. Personal Ledger keeps and uses complete history of currencies.
Transaction is a general financial operation. There are three types of them:
You can also say that the transaction can be of "Income", "Expense" or "Transfer to another account" type. If transaction is not a "Transfer to another account" it must relate to either of "Income" or "Expense" category, that is, in this case must necessarily be given category. If the transaction - transfer, the category can not be specified. Income transactions increase an amount of money on account, and Expense, on opposite, decries it.
Thus, the transaction has the following attributes:
Most of these attributes will be filled automatically or after setting "Payment designation" or "Contact". The "Price", "Amount", "Commission" and "Discount" may be automatically specified after defying a "Contact".
Here is more description on the way the Price, the Amount, the Commission, the Discount and the Total Amount are calculated and dependency between them.
If transaction is applied as "Income" than:
"Total Amount" = "Price" x "Quantity" - "Discount" -
"Commission".
In this case "Discount" is amount how much you willing to give up to somebody
who is paying you money according to given transaction.
If Discount is defined in percents, than the percentage is is taken from the
"Price" x "Quantity".
The Commission defines an amount of money you paying for perform operation of
transaction. If Commission has a value in percents, than the percentage is is
taken from the Final Amount.
If transaction is applied as "Expense" than:
"Total Amount" = "Price" x "Quantity" - "Discount" +
"Commission".
In this case the Discount means how much you willing to give up to somebody who
is receiving money from you according to given transaction.
If Discount defined in percents, than the percentage is taken from the
"Price" x "Quantity".
If Commission defined in percents, than the percentage is taken
from"Price" x "Quantity" - "Discount".
To transfer money from one account to another, you must create the transaction of transfer type. To do this, you have to specify the account, which you willing create transfer to and to define the Total Amount that to be transfered. If that Total Amount is negative, than money will be transfered from the Account of Transaction to the Account of Destination. If the Total Amount is positive, than the direction is reversed: money will be transfered from the Account of Destination to the Account of Transaction. In other words, the Account Balance will be changed exactly on value of the Total Amount.
There are limitations for transactions as well:
At the creation and saving of transfer transaction, the mirrored transaction is created, based on a current one with the same attributes with the following exceptions:
So an amount of money at particular account is reduces as much as it increases on another with the exclusion of a commission.
The category allows you to group and point out the destination of transaction. For an example, transaction with the Designation of "Apple" belongs to "Expenses:Food:Fruits".
The Category may be of two kinds: Expenses and Incomes. Depending on its type the category defines all transactions which belong to it.
Categories are organized hierarchically with no limit for a number of levels. All subcategories has the same type as their parent category has.
Categories are very useful for applying filters and searchings, also for building a report and analyzing your financial data.
Projects is another tool for organization of your financial operations. Projects allows you to classify your financial operation by a purposes, spending or earnings independently from a category . Using Projects you keep a trace of a spending, for example, for building a house, proceeding financial operations for you business, keeping travailing expenses and so. You can also call Projects as a Tags, applied to a transaction, only with a hierarchical structure.
The Projects as well as an Categories have an hierarchical structure with no limit in number of levels.
To work with a Project, it is handy to use Filters, which letting you choose only those transaction, applied to any particular project and its Sub-Projects. Later, with the aid of reports or under "Transactions" Tab, you can analyze, evaluate the profit and to make financial plans.
Filter is the most useful instrument in Personal Ledger. It allows you to define an environment during you work with a transaction. By using the filters you can define the environment you working with by defying a Projects, an Accounts, a Categories and so on. When you working with a report, filters allows you to choose the area of your interest at the analysis of financial information.
The Filter by itself consist of a multiple simple conditions, that you may add or remove or save for further reuse.
Besides of a simple sorting of a transactions the Filter carries many intellectual functions, as for example, auto-filling the Account and the Currency fields for a new transaction; based accounts in filter shows the total balance of this accounts at the most appropriate currency; shows planned transactions and an automatical prognosis based on you current account state and range of dates in filters, etc.
You can use Filters in Currency Exchange Rate list, besides of transactions in the Transactions Tab, the Planning Tab and the Report Tab.
You can create Planned Transaction as well as regular Transaction (simple or split). Planed Transactions has a additional attributes:
Planned by default till after tomorrow, transaction are shown in a lower table under Transaction Tab. If you change the value of a date range in the filters, than all transactions for this dates will be show in this table. It is useful reminder of planned transactions and it is possible to edit them in a table. You also can delete any of them. You can also delete them gradually, not deleting entire records. To do this, select transaction and enter the value to reduce amount of transaction you want; than press delete. You can easily mark any planned transaction as factual by editing it directly and pressing "Record" Button.
Besides you can see the amount of money which planned transactions are (with the filters rules) applied for and evaluate the balance for the future. All the Reports can be build with the all planned transactions in mind by giving data ranges in the filters.
Definitely the planning is a very powerful and flexible tool. Just by careful planning of all repeatable payouts and incomes, as well as everything to be stipulated this way, later you can easily bring necessary corrections "on the fly". Then you can make precise prognosis on the future of many aspects of your financial affairs and full use of planned structure.
Basically the reports are represented in textual (table) and graphical format. Graphical representation showing the data in comprehensive 3D Diagramms letting you effectively review the financial data. Textual representation gives more extended information on a particular data.
For every sort of a Report you can set up general options:
There are more of individual options for a reports.
All report settings can be saved for further use.