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GnuCash

gnucash.org

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Re: GnuCash

#111

Post by yawaramin »

atmosx wrote: post #57
yawaramin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar trajectory. For the past few years I've been using ledger-cli, which is a purely command-line tool for double-entry bookkeeping. It reads a plain text file containing structured transaction entries, and can output various formats, like ledgers, reports, etc. I'm liking the minimalism, it just needs a text editor to maintain the transaction journal.

How do you perform graph reporting and forecasting?

Nothing sophisticated. I just post-date transactions in the journal and let the tool calculate and show me the running account balance. But it's very customizable in output format. As the other reply said, you can feed its output into any other suitable tools.

Re: GnuCash

#112

Post by pylua »

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…

There sort of is in the us, (ofx) but it is old and poorly supported. Most banks do not implement the newer versions of it.

Re: GnuCash

#113

Post by chrishas35 »

hirvi74 wrote: post #108
sundarurfriend wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where would you like to see it be more relaxed? While the documentation has some pretty strong recommendations, other than the top 5 accounts, you can pretty much do as you wish.

Re: GnuCash

#114

Post by patrick451 »

viceroyalbean wrote: post #31

Does anyone have a good workflow for recording personal finances with this type of tool? My problem is that recording every single transaction becomes tedious, so I end up not doing it and the ledger gets out of sync, making it even more tedious to catch back up in a vicious cycle. I'm considering not tracking individual payments and instead just the total monthly changes so I at least have an up-to-date net worth ca…

For several years, I tried keeping track of each expense, using both quicken and gnucash. I found the same thing as you: entering each transaction is too tedious. If I got real benefit from it, I'd have stuck with it, but honestly I never found the data actually useful. Currently, I've adopted your idea, and just track basically month-to-month net worth in a simple spreadsheet. Even that is more of a motivational tool than something that provides actionable data.

This maybe different for everyone. Currently, I'm fortunate to be saving about 80% of income. But even a decade ago when I was much more in a paycheck-to-paycheck situation, I didn't know what to do with this per-transaction double entry data.

I also think that the entire design of accounting software, where you assign a given expense to a specific category ("groceries", "fuel", "household", "vacation") is too limiting because they are artificially orthogonal. What if I have a "fuel" category and a "vacation" category, but I'm filling up on vacation? Same with groceries, but it's even worse because I needed to buy those anyway. It's really hard to use these categorized transactions to figure out if I need to cut back on vacations, or buy a more fuel efficient vehicle.

Re: GnuCash

#115

Post by sundarurfriend »

cricalix wrote: post #96
sundarurfriend wrote: post #75

Does anyone have experience with Skrooge [1], the KDE equivalent of this? [1] https://apps.kde.org/skrooge/

I poked it, and decided I preferred kMyMoney. The latter has some quirks/bugs (some ledger entries lose the payee, but the relational data is still there - haven’t found a repro to report with), but is generally all I need to track something like 14 asset accounts in multiple currencies.

Thanks for the reply.

Do you mean that kMyMoney is simpler and easier to use? I didn't even know kMyMoney was a thing until now, I'll give it a try.

Re: GnuCash

#116

Post by brewdad »

BeetleB wrote: post #41
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 use KMyMoney which has probably the same "support" as GnuCash for online banking. I now just download transacations from the institution (CSV, OFX, etc) and import the file. Many institutions charge extra for being able to pull automatically, but their export is free. Sounds like a pain but it isn't that bad.

I've found that I appreciate the manual download and import process. It makes me look over each transaction more deliberately than I would if it were just an automated update. I've caught 3 or 4 fraudulent or erroneous charges over the past half decade because I'm forced to look at each charge on my credit cards.

Probably 90-95% of my spending goes on a credit card and then gets paid off at the end of the month. GnuCash has been great for tracking everything. I'll have to look at KMyMoney too.

Re: GnuCash

#117

Post by iggldiggl »

KeepFlying wrote: post #81
justsomehnguy wrote: post #50

Recently I was asked about something to manage a basic income/outcome finances for a small bar. The lack of a basic "cash in the register in the morning", i.e. a basic ability to input the transactions in the different times of day (despite the backend supports it) was an instant no go for the task. I used GnuCash for a couple of years to track the finances of my family, but the inability to place the transactions by…

Time is something I'm struggling with too, though for me it's more that a transaction may have multiple times associated with it but GnuCash only accepts a single one. For example if I transfer between two banks, the date of the transaction in bank A and bank B differ my a day or more. So now I'm stuck deciding which account is "incorrect". Which also makes importing a pain because it borks the matcher.

The workaround (or actually even the proper solution, as the money does need to be accounted for somewhere, doesn't it?) would be to have a "money in transit" account, wouldn't it? Though of course I guess it'd still be somewhat annoying having to manually split up transactions instead of things being handled automatically behind the scene with native support for that kind of thing.

Re: GnuCash

#118

Post by zburatorul »

KeepFlying wrote: post #81
justsomehnguy wrote: post #50

Recently I was asked about something to manage a basic income/outcome finances for a small bar. The lack of a basic "cash in the register in the morning", i.e. a basic ability to input the transactions in the different times of day (despite the backend supports it) was an instant no go for the task. I used GnuCash for a couple of years to track the finances of my family, but the inability to place the transactions by…

Time is something I'm struggling with too, though for me it's more that a transaction may have multiple times associated with it but GnuCash only accepts a single one. For example if I transfer between two banks, the date of the transaction in bank A and bank B differ my a day or more. So now I'm stuck deciding which account is "incorrect". Which also makes importing a pain because it borks the matcher.

You should adopt a similar solution https://github.com/redstreet/beancount_reds_plugins/tree/mai...

Re: GnuCash

#119

Post by yrro »

I was an avoid GnuCash user until HSBC (my bank) stopped offering statement downloads in OFX format.

I took a glimpse into the chasm of madness of trying to OCR their PDF statements and decided... no.

Re: GnuCash

#120

Post by landmass »

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…

I agree with the concept of starting small - I didn't. I have various accounts in various banks and now have 26 accounts that need to be balanced, all in order to have live "net worth" visibility. At first I enjoyed doing it to that level, but not anymore. I need to prune the accounts I enter using .csv and just keep track of current accounts, like checking accounts.

That said, GnuCash is definitely worth the effort - GnuCash has continued while some "easier" financial programs have not. I thought about using it after MicroSoft abandoned MS Money with 10 years of my financial data. I looked at GnuCash but it looked too hard and I migrated to MyMoney instead, but after a few years it dropped support. I again looked at GnuCash but again chose not to face learning the "harder" GnuCash and migrated to MoneyDance; after a few years they changed its default to "Save on exit," rather than allowing me to exit to abandon mistakes and start over. This time I migrated to GnuCash in the hope that it will be longer-lived.

I don't know that I need to have all my financial data for 25 years, but if I'd chosen GnuCash from the start I'd still have it. It turns out that the other systems were not easier, if you include having to re-learn so many financial systems and incompletely migrate existing data.

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