Quick start

This page takes you from an empty document to a picture of your finances. If you’d rather look around first, choose File›Open Example Document: it opens a document with a year of made-up transactions that you can change as much as you like.

1. Start a document

DovleEntry opens with the document you used last, or with an empty one. To start another one, choose File›New Document. Its tabs are already there: Net Worth, Profit & Loss, Transactions, Schedules and Budgets.

The amounts of a new document are in the currency of your regional settings. To use another one, open View›Preferences... and change Native Currency, in their Document Properties section.

2. Add the accounts you have

In the Net Worth tab, select ASSETS and press Ctrl+N, or click at the bottom left. A new account appears, ready for its name: type “Checking” and press Enter. Add your savings, your wallet and anything else you own the same way. Then select LIABILITIES and add what you owe: a credit card, a loan.

There’s no need to add accounts for your income and your expenses in advance. They appear by themselves when you name them in a transaction.

3. Give each account its balance

Double-click an account to open it in a tab of its own, and press Ctrl+N to add an entry. Give it the date of a balance you know, from your last statement for instance, “Starting balance” as its description, and the balance in Increase. Leave Transfer empty: the money comes from no other account. Press Enter.

4. Write down your transactions

Go to the Transactions tab with Ctrl+3 and press Ctrl+N for each transaction. Fill in the row, going from one cell to the next with Tab:

• Date: type the day, and the month and the year if they aren’t the current ones.
• Description: what it was, like “Weekly groceries”.
• From and To: where the money came from and where it went, like from “Checking” to “Groceries”. A name that no account has yet becomes a new income or expense account.
• Amount: how much.

Press Enter to keep the row. DovleEntry completes what you type from the transactions it already has, so the second time you buy groceries, a few letters are enough.

5. See where you stand

Go back to Net Worth with Ctrl+1 to see your net worth and how it changed, and to Profit & Loss with Ctrl+2 to see what came in and what went out. To change the period they cover, use the date range at the top of the window: Ctrl+Alt+1 shows a month, Ctrl+Alt+3 a year.

Save with Ctrl+S. Your document is a single file, with the extension .dovleentry.