GnuCash

I found my caveats file! It was actually an errant newline at the end of each file. Gnucash should've known enough to strip it. And the other thing was a file that used `--` for deposits, so I have a note to 's/--//g' those files.

I think that's the kind of thing that some of us see as a neat challenge to figure out and overcome; but for others, it becomes a barrier for entry. I still evangelize the heck out of Gnucash, though. It's so powerful...and not Intuit.

Do you really need full double-entry accounting for personal finances? This usually boils down to either

- you need it for tax/legal/bureaucratic purposes, or

- you are really short on money and you need to keep track of it down to the last cent.

When either of those two conditions are true, double-entry is amazing.

If the above are not true (and it sounds that way based on your comment) then I would do it statistically.

Determine how much time you would like to spend recording transactions. Let's say it's 1/11 of the time it takes when you are doing a full accounting. (Eleven is good because it's prime, so it's less likely to accidentally line up with cyclic transactions.)

Enter all expenses/incomes only every eleventh day. Nothing the other days. You have to be really strict about this!

Instead of entering the actual number, though, multiply it by 11.

Tadaa! After a while, you have practically the same result but at a fraction of the effort (roughly three times per month instead of 30.)

Note that the number you get will have some sampling error. For bonus points, you can calculate the size of this. Depending on how large the variation of your expenses is and how often you enter them, it's not unreasonable to get a sampling error where three standard deviations are ±50 % -- are you okay with a rough estimation like that? If not, you have to sample more often.

More technical note: what I've described is actually a stratified sampling scheme, only once you've sampled a day, you do a full accounting of the transactions within that day. Depending on the practical structure of your transactions, you might find that you can optimise your sampling scheme (lower sample error and/or less effort) by selecting more days, but only entering one transaction from each day.

Read up on sampling! It's powerful!

I have tried GnuCash in the past. It was too complicated for my needs. All other budgeting software I thought was too complicated and complex for the average person. I use a spreadsheet to handle my budget. I keep it as a reminder that temporary solutions can become permanent. The file name is "planstemp". It was temporary more about ten years ago. I found using different banks depending on the purpose of the transaction the easiest way to keep track of expenses. I use one bank for regular monthly expenses and another for daily expenses. Regular expenses are predictable. If I was running a business, I keep that separate from personal.

Likewise, Beancount.

https://beancount.github.io/

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 the time is a thing which drived me to totally abandon the thing.