Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GnuCash

gnucash.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 124 posts

Re: GnuCash

#81

Post by KeepFlying »

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.

Re: GnuCash

#82

Post by gombosg »

neilv wrote: post #17

GnuCash can be a lot of work, but I've found worthwhile ways to use it. YMMV. I used GnuCash when I had a consulting business (including abusing the invoicing features for time-tracking), as well as for personal finances. Over the years, I keep experimenting with different ways to use it. At one point, I could even run a custom report to show how much I was saving by making coffee at home rather than picking up one e…

I used to use HomeBank (http://homebank.free.fr), now just a LibreOffice spreadsheet. I think for personal finances, it's perfectly fine to just record monthly total expenses as a bulk sum, for each account. Unless 'something's off' (i.e. my family has spent too little or too much) it's okay to not know all the expense items.

Re: GnuCash

#83

Post by p_l »

Plasmoid wrote: post #67
amaccuish wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umm, in the EU due to PSD2, all banks must provide a standardised API: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_banking

Sort of. IIRC, (either the EU as a whole or just the UK) basically killed open banking. To even use the standard you were required to be an accredited broker even if the data was kept local to the user's device. Getting accredited cost a fortune and basically made it impossible for anyone but the Intuits of Europe to use it.

I think most "normal" accounts in Poland have CSV report options, and some have standardised MT940.

"Enterprise" accounts are pretty much dead in the water without some APIs for over a decade now, as far as I know - the big clients want their SAP and whatnot to directly integrate.

Re: GnuCash

#84

Post by Fnoord »

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…

Firefly III uses plugins to import the data. Any9ne can write one, in theory.

Re: GnuCash

#85

Post by kkfx »

apatters wrote: post #68
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…

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 they work for their user profit instead of some third parties mostly employing the human customer as a data cow and small-microfinance bank...

Re: GnuCash

#86

Post by atgreen »

ninjin wrote: post #63
johncs wrote: post #22

For those of you who like the idea of GNUCash but are looking for an easier tool to use (for us developer folks), check out https://plaintextaccounting.com .

I use a plain text ledger, ledger [1], and a Makefile for all the accounting needs of my LLC. Then I export to CSV whenever my accountant needs to get involved. It has worked great so far, even with a heap of currency conversions involved. Being able to easily leave comments for each entry has also been a blessing. [1]: https://www.ledger-cli.org

I've tried almost every tool, both free and proprietary, including GnuCash, before finally landing on ledger a few years ago. Ledger, when supplemented with little scripts, was the first tool that could handle the complexities of my financial world.

Re: GnuCash

#87

Post by atgreen »

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?

For visualizations, I do two things... (1) use little scripts to generate gnuplot input, (2) convert ledger files to beancount files, and use fava. Both have their place. For forecasting, ledger has some built-in capabilities, although I've never used them.

Re: GnuCash

#88

Post by samatman »

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…

I have a gnarly python script which converts all the CSVs I need into a ledger format file and classifies them into accounts by merchant.

I do have to go fetch the CSVs myself, and if I want a purchase from e.g. Amazon to go into a category which isn't Expenses:Goods:Amazon I have to move it, but all in all it does the two things I need: puts my purchases into buckets and makes me look at my expenses on what should be a monthly basis but is closer to quarterly lately.

This is with ledger-cli, rather than GnuCash, but same principle I think.

Re: GnuCash

#89

Post by Diris »

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…

You can easily import data into Firefly III using their data importer[0] and Nordigen API or Spectre (usage is explained in [0]). Doing so automatically is just a matter of running a cron job

[0] https://docs.firefly-iii.org/data-importer/

Re: GnuCash

#90

Post by Vohlenzer »

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…

I too got bored of having to go through every little transaction and categorising them according to my budget. I had already simplified my expenses budget down to three categories; essentials, luxuries and goals.

My solution was to open a dedicated current account and or credit card for each category. This makes assigning a category to transactions simple because I know which budget category each account is designated to.

This also helps with day-to-day budgeting because I have setup scheduled transactions to top-up my essentials and luxuries bank accounts with the correct amount of funds from my savings. A side effect is the stark reminder that using the credit cards eats away my goals budget because I've already spent my allocated funds for essentials or luxuries.

One downside here is losing the credit card protection on some purchases. The work around is to transfer funds back to savings when making these purchases. Another is that it's difficult to adopt immediately because opening several accounts may affect credit rating or rouse suspicion from financial institutions.

Post reply on HN