21–30 of 179 posts
I’m not sure what it was but I couldn’t get it working for me. Tried HomeBank afterwards and was blown away by how accessible it is in comparison.
I might give another try at GnuCash to track something like business/project expenses but it was rather hard to use for my personal finances.
I looked carefully at GnuCash before settling on Beancount (or plain-text accounting in general) for personal finance software. The deal breaker for me was the underlying XML or SQLite formats of GnuCash. These are not terribly amenable to scripting, either for ingesting raw data or reporting. Whereas this is basically the point of plain-text tools like Beancount or HLedger. GnuCash feels too much like a walled-garde…
Databases on the other hand are built for this. After years of dissatisfaction with plain text accounting and many hours spent trying to improve it, I now use SQLite and it has been an enormous improvement.
But GNUCash existed when I first got a job decades ago.
GNUCash exists today.
I don't think any other package really matches the endurance.
I've tried many personal accounting software and all of them (but old Pcoket Money for PalmOS!) are very unhelpful in filling in expenses. If you need to record whole shop visit as one transaction (like "Food at Lidl") it is tolerable, but as soon as you want to enter each line in your receipt as separate part of split transaction (like, food:milk = 2 euro, food:bread = 1 euro, food:eggs = 3 euro, food:meat:pork = 8…
GnuCash and KDE Money always seemed very similar to me. Why should I use GnuCash over KDE money?
Vice-versa if you're using KDE instead.
GnuCash and KDE Money always seemed very similar to me. Why should I use GnuCash over KDE money?
First thing to come to mind is if Gnome's your DE and you prefer more-native-feeling apps. Vice-versa if you're using KDE instead.
I've tried many personal accounting software and all of them (but old Pcoket Money for PalmOS!) are very unhelpful in filling in expenses. If you need to record whole shop visit as one transaction (like "Food at Lidl") it is tolerable, but as soon as you want to enter each line in your receipt as separate part of split transaction (like, food:milk = 2 euro, food:bread = 1 euro, food:eggs = 3 euro, food:meat:pork = 8…
I've tried many personal accounting software and all of them (but old Pcoket Money for PalmOS!) are very unhelpful in filling in expenses. If you need to record whole shop visit as one transaction (like "Food at Lidl") it is tolerable, but as soon as you want to enter each line in your receipt as separate part of split transaction (like, food:milk = 2 euro, food:bread = 1 euro, food:eggs = 3 euro, food:meat:pork = 8…
In terms of the detail, I used to do very detailed breakdowns of categories, but now I don't really see the point: my app supports 'split transactions' (one of the reasons I actually made it, as existing solutions had poor support for them back in 2009), and I generally just use things like 'Food', 'Drinks', 'Essentials' as categories, as it never really made sense (at least for me) to detail them with such accuracy.
But for things like 'coffee', I do 'Drinks:Coffee', so I can see how much I am spending on fairly specific things, but I guess it's a balance in terms of whether it's worth the effort to record them so accurately compared to making use of the details.
Similarly, things like 'Car:Fuel', 'Car:Service', etc...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is absolutely a valid reason to not use GnuCash. As for myself, I agree that the XML format is not great, but I use the SQLite format, which allows me to write scripts on it.
You can write scripts to transform XML documents as well.