For personal accounting, MoneyManagerEx has a much simpler UI than GnuCash.
GnuCash 5.9
41–50 of 179 posts
Re: GnuCash 5.9
#42I'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…
It would be better if the software could just scan the receipt. And if you live in the country with electronic receipts (like Russia) then you can get them to your email in electronic form or find online by identifiers on a paper receipt.
Re: GnuCash 5.9
#43I'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…
Is it actually all that useful to you to track each receipt line-item? For a few specific types of purchases, maybe, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest you might be taking on needless work that doesn't create value for you anywhere near that level of effort.
I did this exercise for a little over a year to understand my expenses in detail. Like the OP, I found it really frustrating to do with any bookkeeping software I tried, to the point where I eventually gave up as I didn't think it was worth the effort. I started writing a web app to make this easier but just didn't have the motivation to finish.
With that said, I learned quite a bit as a result of that level of granularity. When all expenses at Amazon, Walmart, etc go into the same bucket, it's really difficult to truly understand what you're spending your money on and if you have a problem you need to curb. Seeing "$X in spending at Amazon" isn't really that useful without knowing how important or frivolous any of those expenses were.
Re: GnuCash 5.9
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
GnuCash has a scripting engine. If you have to do a specific correction very often, it might be worth it to implement something. If possible, the CSV should be preprocessed of course. If nothing else works, a Gnucash file is XML. A bit annoying to work with, but quite possible.
Can you share a link to the docs for the scripting engine? I've seen conflicting information over the years and I'm not sure what the latest really is.
Does this help? https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/tree/stable/bindings/pyth...
Re: GnuCash 5.9
#45I'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…
Is it actually all that useful to you to track each receipt line-item? For a few specific types of purchases, maybe, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest you might be taking on needless work that doesn't create value for you anywhere near that level of effort.
At the grocery store it would be extremely useful to understand where money is going related to other food groups (diary is 10% more). At the garage or clothing store not very useful because the entire purchase is a good group but how much you are paying for meat could help you decide to buy it elsewhere but allow you to keep buying bread.
Re: GnuCash 5.9
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the only reason I have any experience with these apps. When MS sunset Money and compatibility started to get wonky, my in-laws were at a loss at what to do. We never did find an alternative. They do however have a seperate Win 7 PC just for Money, which at there age isnt a huge problem but for others that is not viable long term.
Why not just setup a VM for Money specifically?
Because they had a spare M.
Re: GnuCash 5.9
#47GnuCash is solid. One thing that I love: I have full control over my data, and its stored as a simple xml (also supports SQLite, but why use more complex when simpler works just as well?) I have a few (comparatively minor) complaints about GnuCash, but they're around UI. Things like: it would be nice to assign all matching (eg Regen) transactions to a selected account, and stuff like that. But overall, having somethi…
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Suppose you don't have SQLite, how do you open a SQLite database? The only way is you have to re-implement SQLite from scratch. Good luck with that.
Now imagine you don't have vim, how do you open an XML file? You can use any of other thousands of text editors out there, or any of tens of libs in tens of different languages.
I think your take that sqlite is simpler than a text file is the weird one.
Re: GnuCash 5.9
#48I'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…
Is it actually all that useful to you to track each receipt line-item? For a few specific types of purchases, maybe, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest you might be taking on needless work that doesn't create value for you anywhere near that level of effort.
Just tracking no but allocating yes.
If you plan ahead you know how much money you actually have and can plan better.
I find I save way more with a proper budget in place.
Re: GnuCash 5.9
#49I'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 a lot in the past as well, and after getting annoyed with proprietary OS X software (iBank in particular) back in 2009 or so, and not really liking GNUCash and KDEMoney (at least back in 2009) ended up writing my own open source simple app (native Cocoa, with a more recent Qt port for Linux) that I've been using every since on a daily basis. In terms of the detail, I used to do very detailed breakdowns of…
At some point I really should do a first principles analysis of why I track money... as far as I know, it mostly comes down to: 1. is fraud happening? and 2. Am I saving enough for retirement? Oh, and I guess 3. taxes
For fraud, I think it's basically a matter of whether we can recognize each transaction. You don't actually need to download transactions for that; you can just skim your monthly statements.
For saving, that's tricky because there needs to be that recognition of what categories are likely to increase during retirement versus decrease. I gave that a single pass a while back, and now I have a count each month of those expense categories that will continue into retirement, along with a 12-month average, so I can get a sense of what my portfolio needs to be able to fund after I retire. For that, even though I have Banktivity, I also have to use a spreadsheet.
For taxes, I don't know if anything really makes that easy. It's hard to know what category breakdown you really need to know whether you're capturing all your tax benefit, and my financial software doesn't tell me "oh, by the way, you'll want to split that transaction since some of it has a tax benefit."
Re: GnuCash 5.9
#50I 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…
To each their own I guess: my experience is the exact opposite. Plain text looks simple to human eyes but parsing it in a structured way is a nightmare and scripting edits to plain text is a mess. 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.
I agree with using the tool that works best for your purpose.
For me, I found that the SQLite models of GnuCash aren't straightforward to query. That's why Beancount created its own query language. Martin Blais has a good discussion of why a traditional database doesn't quite fit for many accounting purposes https://beancount.github.io/docs/beancount_query_language.ht...