TerminologyA document is a Skrooge file (extension .skg). It can contain an indefinite number of accounts. You can use one document to manage all your accounts at once.
A Skrooge account is similar to your bank account. For example, if you own one personal account, your wife has a personal account, and you both have a joint account, you can create these three accounts in Skrooge. Every time you spend or earn some money, you register an operation, and indicate the account this operation was made on.
An operation is either a credit or debit to one of your accounts. If you assign a category or tracker to operations, you can analyze how you spend your money.
A standard operation is the basic operation in Skrooge. For example, "Today, spent 20€ from credit card for groceries".
A split operation is an operation for which the total amount is split over several categories, dates and/or trackers. For example, "Yesterday, spent 100€ at the supermarket, of which 60€ were for food, and 40€ for clothes".
A transfer in Skrooge records the movement of a quantity of money from one of your Skrooge accounts to another.
This must not be confused with the payment mode chosen: if you made a transfer, for example using your bank's website, to someone else's account, this is not a transfer operation, because Skrooge doesn't know about that other person's account. It is a standard operation with transfer as its payment mode.
Read the transfer section if things are still unclear.
When you import operations from your financial institution into Skrooge, they are not considered valid right away and appear in blue. You need to manually validate them. Such validated operations will no longer appear blue.
Note that it is possible to automatically validate operations on import, by turning on the corresponding option in the settings.
During the reconciliation process, you point all operations in Skrooge that appear in the corresponding account position. Such pointed operations display a half-filled square in the Status column of an operations view. A pointed operation is not Checked until you complete reconciliation.
When all operations on your account's position have been pointed in Skrooge, you can complete the reconciliation process. Skrooge then turns all Pointed operations into Checked Operations, which display a filled square in the Status column of an operations view.
A category is basically a class of operations. Some classic examples include "Food", "Taxes", and "Salary". A category can contain other categories: it is a hierarchical structure. For example, category "transport" can contain categories "bus", "car" or "plane". Skrooge can handle an infinite number of categories.