User Guide

Agendas and backups

An agenda is one set of books: its accounts, categories, subjects, transactions and notes, kept in one file on your disk. Most people have one agenda for the household; a small business or a rental flat is a good reason for another.

The Open panel is where the program starts. It lists the agendas it knows, creates a new one, and opens any agenda file you point it to. A new agenda asks a few questions about you - country, currency, what you want to track - and sets up its trees accordingly. You can change all of it later. Try a Demo Agenda makes one with a year of an invented household in it, to try things out on.

Backups

A backup is made when you ask for it - Agenda > Back Up - into the backups folder set in Settings, under the agenda's name and the day's date; Agenda > Restore From Backup brings an agenda back from one. Back up after a big import or before an experiment, and keep the folder on a disk that is not the one the agenda lives on, or in a folder a cloud drive synchronizes.

Agendas of version X5

An agenda of RollingCoin X5 is converted when you open it: the program offers the conversion, the converted agenda takes the name the old one had, and the old file stays beside it under an extension of its own.

The window

The window has a navigation bar on the left with the sections of the agenda: Dashboard, Transactions, Overviews, Statistics, the trees (Accounts, Subjects, Categories, Values), My Notes, Agenda Notes and Users - and Import Transactions while an import is open. Most sections show their data in the middle and the properties of the selected item on the right. The settings of the program are behind the Settings button in the corner of the Open panel; the setup of an agenda opens from the properties of a user allowed to change it, in the Users section.

The properties pane follows the width of the window: on a wide screen it sits beside the data, on a narrow one below it. The menu and the toolbar change with the section; the right mouse button over any data offers the same commands as the Edit menu.

The Dashboard

The Dashboard is the first screen of an open agenda. Needs attention lists what is waiting for you: the payments the phones handed over, the statements that arrived in the accounts' folders, the transactions waiting for someone's review. Below it are the planned payments due within the next 30 days, the balances of your accounts, and this month's spending by category next to the month before.

A double click on a line goes where it leads - to the new transactions, to the import screen with the statements loaded, to an account's transactions - and a click on a column of the chart opens the statistics of that category.

Transactions

A transaction is one movement of money: a card payment, a standing order, a salary, cash handed over. It has a date, an amount, the account it left and the account it reached - the far one being the shop, employer or person on the other side - and for each part of it a category, what the money was for, and a subject, whom or what it concerned: a member of the household, the car, the flat.

The Transactions section lists them for a period and lets you filter by account, category, subject or text. A transaction can be split into several parts, each with its own category and subject - one shopping trip, food and household chemicals apart - and can carry a note, a link or a picture of the receipt.

Most transactions do not need to be typed: they come from the import or from the phone. Typing one by hand is for the cash you did not capture and for things no statement shows.

Planned payments

A payment you expect again - the rent, a subscription, an insurance premium - can be planned: select its transaction and choose Edit > Plan This Payment…, once or every week, month or year. The next payment then stands among the transactions in grey until a statement line settles it, and the Dashboard lists what is due within a month; for an account without statements, Paid on the Dashboard settles it by hand.

Importing statements

Export a statement from your bank's site - CSV, XLSX, PDF, HTML or ODS all work - select its account in the Accounts section, press Import Statement and load the file; or copy the table out of internet banking, and the import screen reads it from the clipboard as it opens. RollingCoin reads the lines, finds the date, the amount and the counterparty in whatever notation the bank uses, and shows the result before anything is saved.

Every line gets the account on the other side and a category, and a subject where something in the line says one: from the built-in catalogue of shops and services and from your own patterns. A line nothing recognized is imported all the same, as *Not recognized yet*, and marked for you to sort out; add a pattern for it on the import screen and every later statement recognizes it.

A line that is already in the agenda as a transaction is recognized as a duplicate, so importing the same statement twice does not double anything. A statement belongs to one account, and several statements of that account - a whole year of monthly ones - can be loaded in one go.

Statement folders

An account can have a statement folder that its statements are saved into - by you, by the bank's export or by a synchronized drive. RollingCoin reads it when the agenda opens and while it is open. A new statement is either offered on the Dashboard, a double click away from the import screen with everything filled in, or imported at once; an imported statement moves into the folder's Processed subfolder.

Accounts, categories, subjects

The three trees describe your money in three ways: accounts are where it moves from and to - your own, and the shops, employers and people on the other side - categories are what it was for, and subjects are whom or what it concerned: a member of the household, a piece of property, a valuable.

Each tree is yours to shape. Add a branch, rename it, move it under another - every transaction attached to it moves along. A branch that is no longer in use - a shop you no longer buy from, a car you have sold - can simply stay, and its history with it: every payment to it, however far back, is there when you look. A branch you do delete hands its payments to the one above it rather than losing them.

Patterns

Every account, category and subject can carry patterns: pieces of text the import looks for in a statement line, where * stands for any text, ? for one character and # for one digit. The account of your energy supplier carries the name and the account number the statement shows, so every payment to it is recognized; a category with a word every pharmacy prints collects every pharmacy. The built-in catalogue does this for thousands of shops and services; your own patterns come first when both match.

Overviews, statistics and values

The Overviews section holds tables you build yourself: a row per transaction and a column for each part you want to add up - the tax base and the VAT of a year, the running costs of the car - with the totals underneath. Statistics are reports over the transactions: where the money went, by category, subject or account, over a period and against the period before, drawn as charts. Click a slice to step into it.

The things you own that are worth something - shares, funds, a car, a flat - are subjects with a value attached: a series of figures over time, downloaded for shares, funds and exchange rates by the watched values program that comes with RollingCoin, and typed in for the rest. The Ownership report of the Statistics shows what each of them cost you and what it gained or lost in value, and the Result with value changes figure adds those gains and losses to a period's result. Buying an investment is an expense on the account and an asset held by the subject at the same time.

The Wallet app on your phone

RollingCoin Wallet for Android captures cash payments, and it comes from your computer or from Google Play. Open the Phones program - from the Open panel, from Settings or from the toolbar of the Accounts section - and point the phone's camera at the code it shows: the page that opens lets you install the app and then open it paired with the computer. With the app already on the phone, scan the same code from inside it. Installed from the computer, the app has to be trusted on the phone, and the page says how. From then on the phone hands its payments over whenever it is on the home Wi-Fi, the same network as the computer.

On the phone: tap the wallet, take a picture of the receipt or type the amount, and write down who was paid unless the app remembers it from the place. The record waits on the phone until the computer is reachable, then moves into the agenda's wallet folder and shows up in the Transactions section, with the picture of the receipt as its link.

What the phones handed over is listed on the Dashboard, a double click away from the new transactions, and so is anything that did not get through.

Users

An agenda can be used by several people. Each user has a name and, optionally, a password; the agenda records who created or changed what. Rights decide who may only look, who may edit the data - transactions, accounts, subjects and categories - who may take and restore backups, and who administers the users and the agenda's setup.

One user is enough for a household that keeps its books together; separate users make sense when the books are shared with someone who should not see or change everything.

Notes

Two notepads hold whatever belongs to the agenda but is not a transaction: Agenda Notes everyone who opens the agenda reads and writes, My Notes nobody else sees - the insurance policy number, when the boiler was serviced, the plan for next year. Both are text with headings and links. Besides them, every account, category, subject and transaction has a note field of its own.

Settings

Settings covers the program: the folders where agendas, backups, your own icons, value files and the phones' wallet records are kept; what is remembered at login; the language, the appearance - light, dark, as Windows is set, or the classic look of version X5 - and the window layout; logging, crash dumps and the recognition report; the port the phones talk to.

Nothing in RollingCoin talks to the internet on its own: the prices and exchange rates of watched values are downloaded by the watched values program when you run it, and an icon is downloaded from a website only when you ask for one.