Synchronizing Operations

When you receive a bank statement, or if you count the money in your wallet, you need to check the account balance or cash amount against your records in Skrooge. To do this, click Accounts in the left sidebar and double-click the account you want to reconcile. A new tab opens with the entries for this account. Bottom right you will see a blue circular arrow. Clicking it switches to reconciliation mode. A Final balance field now appears in the bottom line; use it to transfer the account balance from your bank statement or the cash amount (Figure 6).

Figure 6: To keep your records up to date, you need to regularly reconcile your budget book with your bank statements and cash in hand.

Skrooge now compares this amount with the account balance resulting from the operations in the budget book and computes the difference if the totals do not tally. If there is a difference in your current account, you may have forgotten to enter an operation. Differences with cash are more common, because you may not be given a receipt for minor cash outlay or might not enter the operation in your budget book. If there is a difference in the cash account, press the plus button on the right to enter the difference in your budget book. You can collectively post petty cash outlay in everyday life in this way.

Importing Bank Statements

Many banks let you download your bank statements as comma-separated values files (CSV, a file format that stores structured data in a text file and makes it easy to exchange data between different programs). Using the File | Import | Import… menu item you can load your account statements in this format and save yourself the trouble of having to enter the data individually.

Skrooge tries to map the fields in the budget book to the individual columns in the CSV file. If you see an error message, you will need to change the settings for importing CSV files in Settings | Configure Skrooge | Import/Export | CSV | Edit Regular Expressions. The required settings will vary depending on the structure of the CSV file. To discover more, open the file in a text editor or spreadsheet. In the first line you will see the names of the individual columns. Then transfer the names of the columns to the program so it can assign a value from the CSV file to each field.

Alternatively, you can load your bank statement data via the AqBanking [3] program. If you do not already have AqBanking, you will need to install it on your system up front. Your bank will give you the data required for the setup. After that, you can access AqBanking in Skrooge via the File | Import | Import with backends… menu.

Evaluating Finances

Pressing Monthly report in the left sidebar tells Skrooge to open an overview of your income and expenses for the past month or quarter (Figure 7). This helps you keep track of your income and expenses and any changes compared to the previous month or quarter. You can see how much you have left at the end of the month and how much you can afford to set aside. You may also notice some potential for savings. Experience shows that an overview like this is not meaningful until you have collected data for at least three months or possibly even a year, when all annually recurring operations such as tax refunds or additional expenses have been posted.

Figure 7: Skrooge compiles your income and expenses in a single overview, giving you a better way of keeping track of everything.