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GnuCash 5.9

gnucash.org

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Re: GnuCash 5.9

#61

Post by zargon »

dagurp wrote: post #31
candiddevmike wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're basically describing envelope budgeting, I think, where the money is (like checking) or isn't (like credit cards) doesn't matter. You have money inside of physical or virtual "envelopes" that represent what money you really have available for X or Y. It's kind of like an abstraction on top of all your money sources.

For this I recommend https://actualbudget.com/ . It is in many ways like You Need A Budget but you can host it yourself for free.

https://actualbudget.org/ is the open source site.

Re: GnuCash 5.9

#62

Post by [deleted] »

stouset wrote: post #24
blacklion wrote: post #18

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…

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.

[deleted]

Re: GnuCash 5.9

#63

Post by jldugger »

GlibMonkeyDeath wrote: post #14

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…

>The deal breaker for me was the underlying XML or SQLite formats of GnuCash

... if SQLite isn't sufficient it also supports SQL backends? I've been running it that way for like a decade.

Re: GnuCash 5.9

#65

Post by PeterZaitsev »

Love Gnucash... allows me to look at my expense history for more than a decade.

I think it would benefit from some changes in the next major version though - the GL of account is good but requires a lot of work for example to track vendors. If I want to track where I'm buying my groceries I have to create separate account for those, rather than being able to optionally specify vendor.

Re: GnuCash 5.9

#66

Post by Postosuchus »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #26

I’ve still yet to find anything that matched the usefulness and straightforwardness of Microsoft Money.

Second that. Microsoft Money was _amazingly_ practical and useful - head and shoulders above Quicken. It is a real shame, Microsoft didn't find a better solution than to sunset it.

Re: GnuCash 5.9

#67

Post by jkaplowitz »

rnadomvirlabe wrote: post #35

I used GnuCash for a while, but I ended up spending too much time making the online sync settings work. For accounts where I had to manually download and import, I would end up putting off importing them due to the friction. I now pay for Quicken Classic and it's some of the best money I spend each year. The online account connections consistently work as expected, and it gets the job done for much less of a headache…

I have to care about accounts in the US, Canada (likely soon to vanish from my list), EU (two countries), and Mexico. I would love to have an option to pay for like Quicken Classic with all the banking connections reliably working, but I don’t think there is a single one that even covers the US and any of the major EU economies, let alone everywhere I care about. Quicken Classic is US and Canada only.

Do you know of such an option, or even multiple options that can be sensibly used together to achieve this?

At this point, given how many “access your transaction data” companies choose not to cross the US-EU bridge in a way that’s viable for direct personal use, I have to think there’s some reason around incompatible bureaucracy or similar. Or maybe not enough people have international enough lives to want it.

Re: GnuCash 5.9

#68

Post by dogline »

tunesmith wrote: post #49
berkut wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Your grandparents tracked money because they were also verifying the math, which could have done by hand. Now, we assume the math is right, and we're checking for fraud.

That, and we like to watch a number go up.

Re: GnuCash 5.9

#69

Post by stouset »

xupybd wrote: post #48
stouset wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A proper budget does not require you to drill down to the level of tracking specific food groups.

Re: GnuCash 5.9

#70

Post by xattt »

muti wrote: post #53
RussianCow wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 granu…

There are many levels in between tracking at the "Amazon" level vs the "Meat:Pork" level. For example I currently track all unprepared food shopping as "Groceries", and would break down "Amazon" shopping into categories such as "Electronics" or "Books". Ultimately it comes down to how much effort you want to spend categorising spending, but there are many levels of granularity and orthogonal dimensions to slice again…

Some stores are modern-day general stores (Costco, Walmart) so you will end up purchasing from several categories on one trip (gift, groceries, home maintenance). YNAB, for example, allows for splitting a single transaction across several categories but you have to figure out what the cost of that individual item was.

It’s annoying to do in Canada where sales tax is not included. The fly in the ointment is that certain categories are tax-exempt (essential foods, kids’ clothing) but not others (prepackaged foods, adult clothing).

If your shopping trip is across three or more categories (gifts, clothing, food), you’ll have to figure out which items were tax-exempt before you can do any subdivision.

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