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GnuCash

gnucash.org

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Re: GnuCash

#101

Post by ytjohn »

nickjj wrote: post #95
nickjj wrote: post #8

I once wrote about using GnuCash as a freelance solo developer at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/using-gnucash-as-a-freelancer... . I started using it in 2017 and still use it today. It's still really solid and makes filing quarterly taxes not too painful. In my opinion it's one of the best tools out there if you like your privacy and don't want to link your bank accounts to a third party service.

I didn't include this in my original reply but today is May 1st. Since GnuCash involves manually entering in transactions it's easy to think that'll take a ton of time. I just timed myself and it took 5 minutes to input everything for April 2022 into GnuCash. This includes all income and expenses (personal and business). I'm not even using GnuCash's automated feature for recurring payments too, so that 5 minutes incl…

I don't do this much these days, but when I was doing full time freelance, I honestly only did most of my "accounting" a couple times a year. In the first years, I used Quickbooks and paid banks extra for their OFX service. Then I stopped paying for that and switched to Quicken. I could go to the bank and credit card sites, spend a bit of time downloading a CSV for each month, then I would copy/paste into Quicken. So very similiar process to yours, I just had the CSV files from the bank as opposed to the website statement. It was very quick, even doing 6-8 months worth at a time.

Later, switched to beancount, it had a CSV importer and I tweaked some example script to do an "interactive" import. Each transaction would be presented and I could accept it as is, or modify it. If I saw a common issue, I could make a copy of the CSV and do a bulk replace, massage the data up front and quickly import.

I'm not saying you need to switch to CSV since your system is working for you. I'm mainly just agreeing that manual entry from a monthly statement can be pretty quick. But for those that are lazy like me that don't responsible balance the books each month, manually grabbing the CSVs and importing many months of statements in an afternoon can still be pretty quick. I would keep the bank statement PDFS + the "official csv" around as a sort of backup. Someone wanting to try GnuCash or any accounting software can start by downloading their statements/csvs for the last year and start punching their transactions in to get a real feel for how working with it will be.

Re: GnuCash

#102

Post by ParetoOptimal »

kayson wrote: post #39

Without a way to easily import data directly from my banks/credit cards, using GnuCash (or Firefly III, a great alternative that's also worth checking out) just takes way more time than its worth. (OFX was not as straightforward to obtain or use as one would hope). Mint is so much easier to use - it automatically pulls and categorizes transactions from pretty much any institution imaginable without no user effort nee…

> Without a way to easily import data directly from my banks/credit cards, using GnuCash (or Firefly III, a great alternative that's also worth checking out) just takes way more time than its worth. (OFX was not as straightforward to obtain or use as one would hope)

In the past I used the plaid api to get transaction data.

Re: GnuCash

#103

Post by ytjohn »

ytjohn wrote: post #101
nickjj wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't include this in my original reply but today is May 1st. Since GnuCash involves manually entering in transactions it's easy to think that'll take a ton of time. I just timed myself and it took 5 minutes to input everything for April 2022 into GnuCash. This includes all income and expenses (personal and business). I'm not even using GnuCash's automated feature for recurring payments too, so that 5 minutes incl…

I don't do this much these days, but when I was doing full time freelance, I honestly only did most of my "accounting" a couple times a year. In the first years, I used Quickbooks and paid banks extra for their OFX service. Then I stopped paying for that and switched to Quicken. I could go to the bank and credit card sites, spend a bit of time downloading a CSV for each month, then I would copy/paste into Quicken. So…

As an update, I decided to try GnuCash out and enter the last months. It's really nice. The first month is going to take you the longest. But entering these really gets you thinking about where your money goes.

For someone starting out, don't go crazy adding empty accounts. Start with a small set of account like the check register or "common accounts" that have a checkings, savings, and maybe a few expenses. Start transcribing from your main or most active checking account. As you enter, you'll see and "Imbalance-USD" account get created automatically in your "transfer" column. What I found useful is to do a few of these, then switch to the accounts tab and create an account for it. Expenses like "Household", and then you can create somethng below that like Utilities. You can put all your Internet and Electricity expenses under that, of if you desire, go ahead and make sub-accounts like "Expenses:Household:Utilities:Internet". Or drop the "utilities" category altogether and embrace a more flat sty "Expenses:Internet". You can later reorganize/rename these however you want.

But once you get the first month in, you have most of your categories setup. If you start on a second month and get something new, you can let it in imbalance and come back to it a bit later. I love the autocompletion and easy account filtering/search/selection in-line.

I don't know if I do enough nowadays to really need this, but if I did, it's definitely pretty easy to work with.

Re: GnuCash

#104

Post by iimblack »

kayson wrote: post #39

Without a way to easily import data directly from my banks/credit cards, using GnuCash (or Firefly III, a great alternative that's also worth checking out) just takes way more time than its worth. (OFX was not as straightforward to obtain or use as one would hope). Mint is so much easier to use - it automatically pulls and categorizes transactions from pretty much any institution imaginable without no user effort nee…

Mint had a data breach and got my bank account hacked which was the first strike. They’re also owned by intuit.

Re: GnuCash

#105

Post by gotaquestion »

UncleEntity wrote: post #14
gotaquestion wrote: post #3

GnuCash only imports ancient quicken formats. The new Quicken formats (since about 2015) are not importable. I'd love to, but I can't restart a 32-year quicken file, so they got me. Plus I think the UI for GnuCash isn't as smooth as quicken (w.r.t. categories and accounts, they all blend together in a weird way, IMHO).

> I'd love to, but I can't restart a 32-year quicken file, so they got me. GnuCash is open source and this is hacker news … They don’t have some sort of exportable file format that both quicken and gnucash can understand? Which, of course, doesn’t help with the UI issues.

You can export QXF and QMTF (and CSV) but the online QXF converters seem dubious... (not QFX, that's different). Although you have inspired me to spend some time examining the formats.

Re: GnuCash

#106

Post by apatters »

kkfx wrote: post #85
apatters wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't stress enough how valuable this is for small business. Auto-importing and auto-classifying transactions from financial institutions completely changes the way that bookkeeping functions. It also gives you real-time understanding of your financial situation and lowers cost/time. Our accounting software auto-imports all of our transactions daily via the Plaid API and our classifying ruleset categorizes 95% of the…

Personally I hope a day enough people join to push a law that impose banks to have a standard open API (like SEPA OpenBank, witch is mandatory here in EU BUT only open to institutions not private citizens) open to any customer NOT ONLY as read-only but also for disposing transactions to avoid the need of crappy web-banking porcals. Unfortunately too many use computers every days without even understanding how can the…

If we legally mandate this what will the consequence be for small businesses that can't afford the cost to comply? (Even if you mandate it for only the big players - what if there end up being only three players who can afford it, they do it well, no one else does and you end up with only three banks?)

I'm super supportive of banks opening up their data for the reasons in my prior post. But the second order effects of regulation are often overlooked--this is exactly what has gone wrong in the US financial industry where we used to have thousands of credit unions across the country and since 2008 most of them have been driven out of business by compliance costs. Naturally the handful of banks that remain are the ones that were the biggest and had the best lobbying effort in Washington...

Re: GnuCash

#107

Post by kkfx »

apatters wrote: post #106
kkfx wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I hope a day enough people join to push a law that impose banks to have a standard open API (like SEPA OpenBank, witch is mandatory here in EU BUT only open to institutions not private citizens) open to any customer NOT ONLY as read-only but also for disposing transactions to avoid the need of crappy web-banking porcals. Unfortunately too many use computers every days without even understanding how can the…

If we legally mandate this what will the consequence be for small businesses that can't afford the cost to comply? (Even if you mandate it for only the big players - what if there end up being only three players who can afford it, they do it well, no one else does and you end up with only three banks?) I'm super supportive of banks opening up their data for the reasons in my prior post. But the second order effects o…

What "small businesses", the smallest bank I know can afford such change, indeed they already have anything in place because OpenBank is mandatory here, only artificially limited to just business operators. There is no costs for no one else.

Re: GnuCash

#108

Post by hirvi74 »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #74
chrsig wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh, hledger does look pretty neat. If I were the only person involved in my budgeting, I'd definitely give it some serious consideration.

There's also beancount [1] which has a (local) web interface via fava [2]. [1] https://beancount.github.io/ [2] https://beancount.github.io/fava/

I think Beancount might actually be better than hledger for the ways I intend to use it, but I wish Beancount was a bit more relaxed with naming conventions and account names/structure.

Re: GnuCash

#109

Post by nickjj »

ytjohn wrote: post #103
ytjohn wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't do this much these days, but when I was doing full time freelance, I honestly only did most of my "accounting" a couple times a year. In the first years, I used Quickbooks and paid banks extra for their OFX service. Then I stopped paying for that and switched to Quicken. I could go to the bank and credit card sites, spend a bit of time downloading a CSV for each month, then I would copy/paste into Quicken. So…

As an update, I decided to try GnuCash out and enter the last months. It's really nice. The first month is going to take you the longest. But entering these really gets you thinking about where your money goes. For someone starting out, don't go crazy adding empty accounts. Start with a small set of account like the check register or "common accounts" that have a checkings, savings, and maybe a few expenses. Start tr…

Yeah that's a good way to go about it. If you relate it back to programming, creating accounts are like abstractions. You wouldn't really start off with a bunch of perfectly named accounts until you get a feel for what you're working with.

I started the same way and over time refined them. GnuCash lets you move previous transactions between accounts as needed.

Re: GnuCash

#110

Post by rodonn »

chrsig wrote: post #43
kayson wrote: post #39

Without a way to easily import data directly from my banks/credit cards, using GnuCash (or Firefly III, a great alternative that's also worth checking out) just takes way more time than its worth. (OFX was not as straightforward to obtain or use as one would hope). Mint is so much easier to use - it automatically pulls and categorizes transactions from pretty much any institution imaginable without no user effort nee…

I hated all of the advertising in mint. I recently started using ynab[0], which can also import balances & transactions from banks. It supports oauth and 2fa, which was nice for the reason you listed: I don't want to give my credentials to anyone, even a "trusted" vendor like intuit. It also has a rest api, which I haven't gotten to try yet, but stands out as a very nice to have feature for me. The downside is that y…

FWIW Mint now offers a premium subscription that removes all of the advertising. https://mint.intuit.com/premium
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