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 transaction, and indicate the account this transaction was made on.
An transaction is either a credit or debit to one of your accounts. If you assign a category or tracker to transactions, you can analyze how you spend your money.
A standard transaction is the basic transaction in Skrooge. For example, "Today, spent 20€ from credit card for groceries".
A split transaction is a transaction 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 transaction, because Skrooge doesn't know about that other person's account. It is a standard transaction with transfer as its payment mode.
Read the transfer section if things are still unclear.
When you import transactions 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 transactions will no longer appear blue.
Note that it is possible to automatically validate transactions on import, by turning on the corresponding option in the settings.
During the reconciliation process, you mark all transactions in Skrooge that appear in the corresponding account position. Such marked transactions display a half-filled square (or something else depending on your kde theme) in the Status column of an transactions view. A marked transaction is not Checked until you complete reconciliation.
When all transactions on your account's position have been marked in Skrooge, you can complete the reconciliation process. Skrooge then turns all Marked transactions into Checked Transactions, which display a filled square in the Status column of an transactions view.
A category is basically a class of transactions. 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.