If you are not using a mouse, the Account Chooser is navigable with the up and down arrows. Pressing the spacebar will open the account.

In both cases, the selected account will be printed in bold font and a colored highlight bar will illuminate the account in the Chooser.

The popup menu available in the Account Chooser allows you to reconcile, edit, add, or delete an account. It is not necessary to open an account in order to use these functions. (i.e., You can be viewing your checking account, and open your savings account for reconciling.) Please be careful when using this liberty to make sure you don't delete the wrong account. The popup also allows you to toggle the Account Chooser's view, to show or hide categories. If you are not using a mouse, these functions are available from the Account or Preferences menubar.

• Number
• Date
• Payee
• Sum
• Memo

Other interface support for market transactions is mostly non-existant at this time. There is a shares report available from the report dialog, but that merely shows the number of shares bought and sold, and the current number of shares held. The future is ripe for expansion at this point.

It should also be noted that for QHacc at the moment, the term "market transaction" really just means buying and selling shares of stock. There is no support for put-options, for example, or anything like that. If you are intersted in such features, feel free to contact me. I'll need your help.

Suppose you get a paycheck every week, and the total amount changes slightly from week to week, but the percentage of tax withheld doesn't. A named transaction allows you to setup the transaction giving just the account names and percentages (or determinate values) for some fields, and a "remainder" account name for any remaining money to keep the transaction balanced. You can then select the named transaction from the Account Viewer popup, enter the total amount, and the percentages get calculated before the transaction is inserted.

When setting up a named transaction, there are some special characters to keep in mind:

The (New) Way

The loan feature is accessible during transaction entry when using double entry bookkeepping. It is not possible to make loan calculations in single entry mode. When entering a transaction, select the split button. In the split dialog, select the loan account as the double entry account as you normally would, but enter "p" (for payment) in the credit or withdrawal field. Likewise, enter the account you want to use for interest in another field, and enter "i" (for--you guessed it--interest) in that credit or withdrawal field. Other splits can also be added as in any other transaction, and will affect the end sum of the transaction.

There are three caveats to loan processing in QHacc:

1. The account selected with a "p" sum must be a loan account. If it isn't, the engine will resolve the transaction without the "p" and "i" splits included.
2. The "p" and "i" fields must be present together
3. If the auto-complete preference is in effect, the auto-completed transaction will not be processed as a loan payment, but rather as a normal split transaction.

The reconcile window is a fully-capable Account Viewer. That is, transactions can be added, removed, or edited just as they can be in the main Account Viewer. Both displays will remain synchronized while the reconcile window is open. Any transactions added while the reconcile window is open will automatically be marked as reconciled, regardless of which display is used to enter it. The reconcile window is modeless, so several accounts be reconciled at once.

The opposite of --archive is --restore. It must be followed by a dump location from which to read the archived data.

In reality, the archive and restore arguments are silently transformed to --export ARC: and --import ARC: arguments. That is, they are just regular old export and import filters. Either format is acceptable when calling the functions.

Once nice feature of the ARC plugin is that the QHACC_HOME given as its second or first argument (depending on the function) can itself reference a plugin. The recursion doesn't go on forever--just one level--but the functionality is important. It means that archived data can be written to any sort of QHACC_HOME. Likewise, restored data can come from just about anywhere.

Archiving and restoring files usually alters the accounts so that the current balance is consistent before and after archiving or restoring, but this behavior is customizable.

The scheme is simple: every plugin has an identifier that tells the QHacc engine what data it expects to see. To use a plugin, just give QHacc the identifier as part of the QHACC_HOME. For example, if I want to have QHacc export its data in XML instead of its native format, I just run qhacc --export XML:<QHACC_HOME>. If I then want to import it into an empty MySQL database structure, I run qhacc --home MYSQL:<QHACC_HOME> --import XML:<export file>. This same scenario plays out with graphing and reporting. For example, the "transactions" report can be accessed from the command line using qhacc --report TRANS:<account identifier>.

There is even one plugin, which I like to call "The Cliimp," which allows a user to enter transactions interactively (or non-interactively) from the command line, thus making the GUI unnecessary. In the future, there will likely be more additions to this type of functionality.

For the memory conscious, it should be noted that plugins are not actually loaded until they are used. When QHacc first starts, it cycles through the plugin directories to figure out what plugins are available, but then doesn't load any until they are specifically called for. The goal for plugins was to have as much functionality as possible without increasing the memory requirements of the project.

The solution is a plugin that can provide the same functionality. It avoids the shell script problems because if QHacc can be compiled, so can the plugin. The plugin can be a bit more straightforward than the shell scripts as well, because they can utilize the QHacc engine instead of just trying to decode the datafiles. It also brings the upgrade procedure into line with other QHacc-related processes, because it operates as an argument to the QHacc executable instead of a totally separate procedure.

So now that you know why the upgrade plugin exists, how do you use it? It's not very difficult, but there are a couple steps:

1. Restore any archives you have taken. The upgrade plugin may change the structure of the datafiles, which can in turn affect the structure of the archived files. If you don't restore the archives before upgrading, the archives may not be compatible with the new files, so later restoration may lead to undefined results.
2. Export your data (qhacc --export /tmp). The upgrade plugin only works against QHacc's native file format, so if you use some other database, you must create a native export.
3. Run QHacc with the upgrade plugin as its home (qhacc --home UPG:/tmp). This will upgrade your old data and start a new instance of QHacc. Save and close the application.
4. If necessary, recreate your datastore (qhacc --create PSQL:qhacc). This is a good practice for all upgrades because the upgrade process may change the structure of the data. If you use a database backend, for example, the table structures may change, and these changes must be accounted for.
5. Import your data to your datastore (qhacc --import /tmp). This completes the upgrade.