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Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

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21–30 of 323 posts

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#21
post #15

I've been playing around with ledger[1] recently. On one level, it is the simplest of tools requiring only a command line and a text editor. But once you wade into the documentation[2] you will begin to see it quite differently. Its capabilities are staggering... [1] https://www.ledger-cli.org/index.html [2] https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html

Beancount as well, very similar in philosophy and staggering in capability, slightly different flavor and rendition compared to ledger.

http://furius.ca/beancount/

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#22
post #6

"Simple" is not an adjective I'd associate with GnuCash. Maybe it is if you're coming from a background in accounting or have a penchant for numbers. It's pretty complicated, and I wouldn't recommend it to someone who just wanted to keep an eye on their budget. A simple spreadsheet will suffice. Or any number of more user friendly tools. That being said, GnuCash is a powerful double entry book keeping system which ca…

Double entry booking is complicated but it pays off to learn if also for personal finance because errors are much less likely than with a spreadheet.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#23
post #4

Does GnuCash integrate well with exports from credit-card companies or banks? It seems like the big blocker is the time spent logging transactions.

Worked fine with my bank. I had to sanitize the csv file a bit, which can be done with a simple script.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#24
post #8
post #7

I'd be curious if anyone has used this and also used YNAB (and can compare them). I'd put YNAB along with 1Password (and probably Fastmail) in the class of best single purpose pieces of software that I pay for.

Why 1Password? I've tried it throughout the years, and IMO nothing has beat KeePass.

It works really well across all of my devices and operating systems (and will continue to do so as those systems change).

I’m glad keepass exists, but I’m happy to support polished software in this domain. I like paying for software I think is really good and focuses on a narrow problem.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#25
post #6

"Simple" is not an adjective I'd associate with GnuCash. Maybe it is if you're coming from a background in accounting or have a penchant for numbers. It's pretty complicated, and I wouldn't recommend it to someone who just wanted to keep an eye on their budget. A simple spreadsheet will suffice. Or any number of more user friendly tools. That being said, GnuCash is a powerful double entry book keeping system which ca…

It is not that hard, I followed a Youtube tutorial and about a week later things clicked in place for me. I am glad I put the effort because I feel that I've gained a skill that will change my approach to money for the rest of my life.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#26
post #15

I've been playing around with ledger[1] recently. On one level, it is the simplest of tools requiring only a command line and a text editor. But once you wade into the documentation[2] you will begin to see it quite differently. Its capabilities are staggering... [1] https://www.ledger-cli.org/index.html [2] https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html

I looked in to switching from GnuCash to Ledger about 5 years ago, and found that it would have been too painful to use for manually inputting the thousands of transactions I had because it just didn't have the nice auto-complete and GUI nicities that GnuCash had.

I'm a hardcore command-line and keyboard-only power user, so I would have absolutely loved to have made Ledger work for me rather than use the mouse-heavy GnuCash interface, but couldn't, and went back to GnuCash with my tail between my legs.

I'd still rather use it, so maybe I'll give it another try some day.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#27
post #6

"Simple" is not an adjective I'd associate with GnuCash. Maybe it is if you're coming from a background in accounting or have a penchant for numbers. It's pretty complicated, and I wouldn't recommend it to someone who just wanted to keep an eye on their budget. A simple spreadsheet will suffice. Or any number of more user friendly tools. That being said, GnuCash is a powerful double entry book keeping system which ca…

Given the typical audience of HN.. if you already know how to program you already know how to use something that's way more complicated than GnuCash.

GnuCash is very simple if you already know double-entry accounting... and learning double-entry accounting would probably be the work of a weekend or less for anyone who knows how to program. Not hard.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#28
post #7

I'd be curious if anyone has used this and also used YNAB (and can compare them). I'd put YNAB along with 1Password (and probably Fastmail) in the class of best single purpose pieces of software that I pay for.

I've looked at YNAB before, I keep wanting to try a finance tracking tool - but I can't ever decide which one is worth my time. What's so good about YNAB? It seems to be marketed at a certain segment that I'm not in. At least, based on their homepage line:

> Stop living paycheck-to-paycheck, get out of debt, and save more money.

As for 1Password, given your username I'm assuming you've tried Bitwarden? What is better about 1Password?

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#29
post #15

I've been playing around with ledger[1] recently. On one level, it is the simplest of tools requiring only a command line and a text editor. But once you wade into the documentation[2] you will begin to see it quite differently. Its capabilities are staggering... [1] https://www.ledger-cli.org/index.html [2] https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html

I looked in to switching from GnuCash to Ledger about 5 years ago, and found that it would have been too painful to use for manually inputting the thousands of transactions I had because it just didn't have the nice auto-complete and GUI nicities that GnuCash had. I'm a hardcore command-line and keyboard-only power user, so I would have absolutely loved to have made Ledger work for me rather than use the mouse-heavy…

Assuming GnuCash can do some sort of plain text record dump, I would probably try to cobble something together to convert that to an acceptable ledger format. Maybe with AWK or something similar...

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#30

I've used GnuCash for years before switching to beancount ( https://bitbucket.org/blais/beancount/ with smart_importer: https://github.com/beancount/smart_importer ) and fava ( https://github.com/beancount/fava/ ). Much easier to work on your journals (ledger, trades, prices...) since they are just text files. Really great if you're using the beancount package for Sublime: https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Beancount…

Been an avid beancount'er for about two years now too!

I've never used the import features, the manual inputting of transactions into a text file doesn't take too long.

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