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slavoingilizov
sidpatil
> The biggest problem with it as far as I can tell is the requirement for manual entry.
GnuCash isn't restricted to manual entry. It supports OFX [1], which you can set up to automatically pull transaction data from your bank.
thisiscorrect
When I tried GnuCash, I was bitten by the fact that, although it supports OFX, many OFX servers don't support it. I found in some cases the server expected the client to support QFX, Quick's extension of OFX. In other cases, these servers seemed explicitly only to support Quicken as a client, e.g. by expecting requests to their servers would be proxied through Quicken and arise form Intuit IP addresses.
slavoingilizov
I understand, but that's still somewhat manual (compared to an API and a client pulling data from it without user involvement)
sgt
For a small business, is that a bad thing? It helps to spend 2 minutes reviewing the numbers.
isbvhodnvemrwvn
To use these APIs in Europe you need a license, and I'm not willing to pull my banking data via third parties. Never mention the apps which want me to give them my full credentials.
I would be willing to use a script which I can audit and run myself, but nobody offers that for my bank.
aspyct
There's Ponto :)
Disclaimer: I work for them. What I'm saying here is 100% personal and does not reflect the views of my employer, yada yada...
To be honest, we're doing an excellent job of protecting our customers' data. It's one of our core concern, and I have absolutely zero issue putting my own data in there.
We do _NOT_ store your credentials or even receive them at any point. Quite frankly, we don't want them. Any authorisation you would give us automatically expires after some time anyway, enforced by the banks.
The primary offer of Ponto is one API to interact with all your own bank accounts. No license needed, we handle all of that. We also provide a unified interface to all the banks.
The API is well thought out. All of our managers are highly skilled devs, so they understand what it takes to build good software (= time).
Check it out, we have a great support directly via Slack. I'm not answering that myself, but the guys who do it are super dedicated and will go a long way to help you.
Honestly I can't say enough good things about this product and our team! A product you can rely on, long term.
mhitza
Belgian law seems pretty data hoarding heavy. Even things like activity logs will be kept around for 10 years after contract termination, per your Privacy terms.
Fintech might be overall more security focused in their software development practices, but 10 years is still a very long time to entrust someone with your data.
capableweb
So, related to the topic at hand, if I use Ponto, can I connect Gnucash to it then so it fetches all information automatically?
slavoingilizov
AFAIK, none of this is true. Banks are required by law to provide open APIs with solid authentication mechanisms, apps usually access them via aggregators and never request your banking credentials.
isbvhodnvemrwvn
The aggregators are third parties I mentioned. You can't easily obtain a license to use those APIs yourself, even if only to access your own data.
The apps which don't have a deal with these aggregators request you to provide credentials (now fortunately most of them are defunct due to MFA)
acatton
Yes, but no. The law is PSD2, but there are so many requirements that it's impossible for a private person to access it. First of all you need to generate a certificate which needs to be signed by a financial authority. Then you use client-based certificates to connect to these APIs. [1]
[1] https://support.n26.com/en-eu/security/open-banking-psd2/psd...
smartmic
Yes, here is one example from German Commerzbank: https://developer.commerzbank.com/
I have been playing with the idea to use its API for my personal finance but the API with MFA is not so simple. At least not simple enough for me to spend much time for writing a customized interface. So I am still using their web interface which works well for my personal needs.
anfogoat
I was excited when my bank first announced Open Banking; I could use it to replace my embarrassing, then Selenium based mess with something more sane. Then Open Banking went into production and I learned I need a business entity and a whole host of other bs to make use of it without relying on some third party bottom feeder.
I don't know what I was thinking. This is Europe and there is very little chance a good idea won't be ruined with some sort of bureaucracy, licensing requirements, utterly vapid credentialism, or as a last resort, some other form of obtuse gatekeeping.
NoboruWataya
> Given Europe and the UK have had Open Banking for years now, and a universe of apps automatically pulling, categorising and reporting transactions (including many incumbent banking apps) - I'm curios if this is a US-only phenomenon - why would people use decade-old software instead of the latest in banking technology? Any users from Europe or UK?
Maybe the situation is better on the continent, but from living in Ireland and the UK I don't believe this is a solved problem here. Open Banking allows third parties to connect with your bank accounts with your consent but I'm not aware of any (reputable) service that simply gives you an API into your own bank accounts. Would be happy to be corrected on that.
That said, I wouldn't call the entry process entirely manual. GnuCash supports importing transactions in a broad range of formats, including OFX, QIF and CSV with user-defined rules. Yes, you still need to log into your bank/credit card/etc and download statements for import, but personally I don't mind doing that. My workflow is that I spend about half an hour every week logging my transactions in GnuCash. Sometimes I skip a week or two. Yesterday I had to enter a full month of transactions and it took me about an hour (complicated by the fact that I had lots of business expenses).
411111111111111
This open banking regulation actually makes it pretty hard for banks to provide you with easy to use APIs. You'll always need to do interactive authentication and these sessions have to be expired all the time.
I wrote a pretty simple budget webapp before the regulation took effect but was forced to stop after.
It's kinda good because it reduces the risk startups take security on the light shoulder like I did with my self hosted app, but it's obviously annoying as a user.
konschubert
German reporting in. The situation is dire. I can download a CSV and there is one app that can pull transactions nightly - but I have to re-authorise it every couple of weeks which takes about 5 minutes.
We must never loose hope.
lesquivemeau
I live in france and my bank lets me download all (or a custom range of) my accounting history and my credit card history as either OFX, QIF or CSV. That's pretty neat and i can import it into Gnu Cash right away.
stakkur
This is common in the US, too. I've been doing it for a long time. My current credit union offers some online customization of that, too.
carderne
Starling gives you API access to your own account. I use it to do a semi-automatic ingest into beancount.
francis-io
theres some third parties that give you an API directly I believe. Firefly III lists salt edge and nordigen.
toastercat
> The biggest problem with it as far as I can tell is the requirement for manual entry.
That's a problem? I'm still using YNAB Classic, and prefer manually entering my transaction data over my time using Mint years ago (which imported my accounts). IMO, it has made me more conscious of my spending.
fatcow
There's also a heavily worked-on upgrade to the importer. Just saying the developers are users too, and want an easier time for data entry.
wodenokoto
I think this time it is because someone posted a tool for converting exports from a Singaporean bank into a format that can be read by gnu cash.
There’s a karma train on HN that you can collect when a related post can be made.
tommyage
I have a fully working setup. In order to be useful for my personal budget management though I need some program to scan receipts and invoices via camera or pdf, to be honest.
Nonetheless. I am from germany and I successfully integrated sync with multiple bank accounts via aquafinance. I can pull down and automatically categorize transactions and even issue transfers.
There are more reasons i did not fully commit yet:
I have no automatic backup configured. I do not have an designated desktop-pc yet. Having all this important data on a mobile device is insecure imo. I have no _real_ usecase to apply double-checked accounting (hopefully this is the correct term).
Nonetheless, it's great. If one had a tax-guy I guess it is even more beneficial.
tommyage
I want to note that there are no licenses fees or paid software in use.
Maledictus
What is aquafinance? Can you say which banks work for you?
tommyage
Sorry for the late reply. I missspelled the library. Probably there is also a missunderstanding due to "lost in translation".
Here is the link: https://aquamaniac.de/rdm/
I integrated all my accounts of Kreissparkasse and DKB. Works flawlessly. I also tried all alternatives to connect to these institutions. I wouls recommed this setup.
leonhard
Do you have suggestions for similar software that uses the EU/UK Open Banking APIs? Would really be interested.
hevsuit
I've been using Gnucash since 2020 to manage personal expenses and income, and it has made the world of a difference. In particular, I find the income statement feature very powerful when I'm doing an end-of-year review of my spending.
In terms of time commitment, about 20 mins every two weeks seems to be enough for logging all my transactions into Gnucash - I have 3 bank accounts, 1 investment account and 1 retirement account.
tinalumfoil
I really like GnuCash but I've struggled with the data entry portion. Most of my transactions are on credit cards, so at the end of every month I'll import maybe 100 transactions in CSV. That import form does not let me bulk change how certain transactions should be imported so for instance if I have 10 transactions in a row that should be deposited to Expenses:Groceries that's 10 clicks.
Another pet peeve is the time order. A lot of times I'll have have a credit and debit on the same day, but the order I enter these depends on the order I'm going through my accounts. Since GnuCash only lets you put a date, it'll look like the account was overdrawn when it's simply mis-ordering the transactions. The only way I know to fix is to re-enter both transactions.
fatcow
You'll like https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/pull/1371 then :)
fatcow
It orders transactions by (1) Transaction Date (2) Split Action (3) Transaction Num (4) Entry Date (5) Description
hevsuit
See my other reply re imports. I say dont bother and instead do it by hand as it speeds up over time.
Yes the same-day ordering is visually quite annoying, although the final end-of-day/end-of-statement balance is really the only value that matters.
olejorgenb
> Since GnuCash only lets you put a date
!
Liquid_Fire
That's interesting, my experience was different from yours. While it is indeed very useful to see all my spending, I found it took way too much of my time to maintain it.
This was partially because the UI has a lot of issues (especially the bank statement importing - if you don't do everything just right, you have to redo it from scratch, and it is very easy to make it fail), and partially because the ability to automatically assign transactions to categories was too limited (it expects the reference to match exactly, but in many cases it doesn't, so I would have to spend a lot of time manually assigning things to categories, again from a really bad UI).
I have to add, this was 5-6 years ago, so it's possible that the UI has improved since then.
hevsuit
I gave up early on with importing bank statements. Instead I just manually create each gnucash entry for each transaction on my online bank statement. If the final gnucash account balance matches my actual bank balance then I know I did it correctly. If it does not balance, I persist in finding the mistyped entry.
This method relies on balancing to the cent each time, since I use my actual bank balance as the target.
It is indeed tedious at first, however I find that 1) manually entering transactions helps me spot problem payments quickly (comprimised credit card, overcharges on direct debits etc.) and 2) the predictive auto-complete feature speeds entries up over time, as most entries are assigned to either a a)groceries, b)eating-out or c)bills expense account. You just press 'Tab' when the correct suggestion pops-up after entring the first few letter, and the line entry gets auto-filled. I still usually need to change the numerical value, but the correct expense account and transaction detail are prepopulated correctly most of the time.
Overall I would recommend giving it another chance.
Karrot_Kream
I use hledger and while I also use my actual bank balances as targets (and often I do get obsessive, to the point of chasing down cents), I think it would be impossible for me to do it without importing my bank statements.
It's not the transactions themselves that I find tedious, it's all the ways I split them. My partner and I split many transactions together and we often travel with friends so I charge friends over Zelle/Venmo for transactions we had while out. Importing transactions from my banks makes it significantly easier to reconcile all of these, especially when I'm on a vacation. Ease of writing importers was a huge driving factor when I switched to hledger from GNUCash.
It's amazing discipline that you enter these manually. I remember that GNUCash has decent autocomplete which certainly helps. I don't think I'd be able to keep up with my finances myself if I had to input it all myself. I personally have anywhere from 50-100 transactions a month.
ycombinete
If you don’t mind my asking, how many transactions go through your account a month?
elesiuta
I use HomeBank [1] because I find the UI a lot simpler than GnuCash and importing mostly just works, with pretty good automatic category assignment that lets you use regular expressions.
The only quirk is that one of my accounts uses a non-standard ordering for its csv file which needs fixing before HomeBank will accept it since the import UI is limited.
I also find that it is useful to track the database file under git.
jrm4
Yup, this is what I ended up using for some time. Though, and YMMV, after doing this in a dedicated way for 2-3 years, I ended up stopping entirely. Probably because more than anything, all the pretty graphs and tracking was mildly interesting -- but it mostly just taught me that I spend reasonably and don't have much of a need to track every little transaction.
szszrk
Do you analyze all smaller spendings, like groceries, all credit card and cash purchases?
I'm using CC for almost everything but there is still a lot that I miss because of random cash spendings.
hevsuit
Cash is a tricky one. Generally I keep cash spends to a minimum. Any small cash withdrawls from my account are generally expense straight into Expenses:Cash Misc. and I don't bother tracking the inidividal cash payments.
However if it is a large cash amount (e.g. rent payment) then I will transfer from Asset:Bank to Asset:Cash before entering into Expenses:Rent.
emacsen
Have you tried any of the plain text accounting packages?
I'm really interested in lived experience of using Gnucash vs, say Beancount or HLedger.
hevsuit
No unfortunately, I've only used Gnucash.
One of the main reasons I stick with Gnucash is the monolithic file format. If one day I need an accountant to review my finances, or if I suffer an audit by the tax man, I can send on the single .gnucash file with all my data. While Gnucash's UI is not the greatest, an accountant/auditor can easily install Gnucash and generate reports with only basic knowledge.
Another nice feature is the file linkage features, where I can directly link my payslip pdf files to the gnucash entries. I have folder structure on my GDrive with all of my stored bills, payslips etc. If required, I can zip up my Gnucash file and corresponding documents folder and the reviewer can instantly access important financial documentation from within the Gnucash application. Gnucash uses relative file paths for sourcing linked documents - all a reviewer has to do is specify the head directory and all the linked documents will open as usual. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I dont think this is a feature in the text-only approaches.
emacsen
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I dont think this is a feature in the text-only approaches.
I unless I'm missing something, all those features are available to me now.
> If one day I need an accountant to review my finances, or if I suffer an audit by the tax man, I can send on the single .gnucash file with all my data.
I can do the same with a git repo, or a zipfile.
> an accountant/auditor can easily install Gnucash and generate reports with only basic knowledge.
I'm not sure I understand the advantage here. A professional could install beancount too, and run the same scripts I do. My real life experience is they don't actually want this level of depth.
> Another nice feature is the file linkage features, where I can directly link my payslip pdf files to the gnucash entries. I have folder structure on my GDrive with all of my stored bills, payslips etc.
You can link to external documents in Beancount and possibly the others and it's kept in the same archival system:
https://beancount.github.io/docs/beancount_language_syntax.h...
It looks like I'm not missing out?
Karrot_Kream
Maybe I can answer this a bit for you. I used GNUCash for a while and then switched over to hledger.
1. I personally prefer graphical tools, especially when looking at a sea of numbers. I gravitated to GNUCash because, even if the tool felt crufty, it was still a lot easier to read/get started with than hledger.
2. I used GNUCash for a long time. GNUCash has a very cool autocomplete feature that actually makes it quite easy to enter in recurring transactions. Things like regular bills, income debits, etc are all trivially autocompletable.
3. GNUCash makes it really easy to generate reports. While hledger certainly is infinitely scriptable/manipulable, GNUCash has a much easier out-of-the-box experience to use.
The main thing that made me switch to hledger was the ease of autogenerating transactions into a plain-text format. My partner and I split many expenses and we often travel with friends so I split many things many ways. I also fund my parents to some extent and so I buy gifts/split transactions with my parents. GNUCash made recurring transactions easy but made it a lot harder to generate split transactions according to fixed splits that I regularly engage with my friends/family in.
With hledger I have a system of taking CSVs, classifying transactions using a stack of Python scripts and using them to generate hledger importable files. I go by hand and annotate transactions that my scripts couldn't classify/split, and then I import it into my main hledger file. I store all my inputs and intermediate imports in a git repository along with my main ledger file for auditability and to look at annotations. The ease of automation just can't be beat with PTA but it's definitely harder to use if you don't have a preference for TUI work.
peterbhnews
I have. All of the plain text accounting packages are optimizing to solve the exact wrong problem. The reality is that even if you are using a commercial package, it's generally not hard to get a CSV (or something like it) OUT of the software. What you actually need for a sufficiently complex financial life is input validation, and that's exactly the problem that plain text accounting software punts on.
Gnucash has a lot of cruft and definitely feels like it was written in 2003, but it does address this issue and provides the basic input validation you need to minimize errors.
The other issue with plain text accounting software is most of it only flags errors after you 'compile' your books (or, more properly, run them through some sort of command-line tool), which is far too late to make data entry convenient. (Some of them have web-based tools, like beancounts "fava" package, that act more like Gnucash...but at that point the term "plain text accounting" loses all meaning IMO, you're just using another client, so why not use a better one?
hiq
> What you actually need for a sufficiently complex financial life is input validation, and that's exactly the problem that plain text accounting software punts on.
Which input validation do you get in gnucash that you don't get in e.g. hledger? Asking as a hledger user. So far I mostly have assertions every month about account balances, and of course hledger checks itself that transactions are balanced. I avoid duplicating accounts (say expenses:something:stuff and expenses:other_thing:stuff) using autocompletion.
YVoyiatzis
If you don't mind me asking, what method or software were you using using prior to Gnucash?
hevsuit
I never did any personal bookkeeping before I used GnuCash. I was however self-learning basic accounting for my startup at the time where we use the cloud-based software package Sage Accounting. After a few months of using Sage I was interested in applying similar methods to my personal finances and discovered Gnucash along the way.
Edit: phrasing
dogline
Personal Finance links I've assembled:
Free/open:
- Gnucash -- solid app: https://www.gnucash.org/
- Beancount -- Text based: https://beancount.github.io/docs/index.html
- Fava -- Web interface for Beancount: https://beancount.github.io/fava/
- Plain Text Accounting -- there are several apps with a similar approach: https://plaintextaccounting.org/
Others/Paid:
- You Need a Budget -- Popular a couple years back: https://www.youneedabudget.com/
- Moneydance -- https://moneydance.com/
- Lunch Money -- https://lunchmoney.app/
lutrinus
I've been using YNAB for years now looked at the competitors from time to time.
While their pricing has increased quite a bit (by now also for long time users coming from YNAB 4), for me it is worth every penny and better than anything else out there. I can't recommend it enough and I don't even get paid to write this comment.
joshstrange
I think I'd keep paying for YNAB even if the price doubled twice more, it's worth that much to me. I'm not saying other budgeting tools can't compare/complete but for me it works really well and has lead to my saving literal 10's of thousands of dollars over the span of just over 2 years.
Once you get everything dialed in you can almost run on auto-pilot (repeating transactions and goals are your friend). Could I drop YNAB and continue with my better financial behavior? Possibly, probably in the short-term for sure but I know I'd slowly drift until I was back where I was before starting YNAB. The yearly cost ($99/yr) is well worth the cost to keep me on the right track and notice early when I'm slipping.
angus-g
I've been using Firefly III (https://www.firefly-iii.org/) since it came up on HN a little while ago. It's aimed more at the budgeting/personal finance side of things rather than a full accounting solution. I like that you can enter things like expected bills, so you can get a bit of a look forward, and good breakdowns of your spending over certain time periods.
karencarits
https://manager.io is also nice, although perhaps targeted more towards small businesses
ptato
I'm a big fan of https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com/
royaltjames
Thank you for linking this! I just ran the gauntlet comparing all these tools and this is the first that feels sane. YNAB is fine, but they did me dirty in 2008
schlipity
What happened in 2008? I'm looking at YNAB and would love to know about the bad things that have happened.
mcjiggerlog
I've been using Gnucash for tracking my personal finance for years and find it indispensable. I export CSVs of my transactions from my bank and import them into Gnucash. I spend about 20 minutes every couple of months to pull in the latest CSV and manually categorize anything that has not been automatically categorized. For investment accounts I just treat them a single asset and add adjustment transactions to keep the total value up to date.
This small amount of work lets me see down to the cent where I am spending money and track my net worth. It has a bit of a learning curve starting out, but I would really recommend trying it out.
phtrivier
What actual actions did you took based on this analysis ? How much do you estimate it saved you ?
NoboruWataya
I'm not the guy you're responding to but for me, GnuCash has helped me identify a number of subscriptions I don't use anymore, that I have then cancelled. It also helped me identify a direct debit that I had forgotten to cancel when I moved house. So there have been tangible savings. Of course you could argue that I could have discovered these things just by reviewing my bank statements regularly, but that's most of the work of importing them into GnuCash anyway, and it's easier to spot these things when you are actively categorising your transactions.
It's also just a helpful way to track the growth of your net worth over time when you have multiple accounts, investments, etc. You may or may not take action based on what you find but it's good to know.
balderdash
I actually do exactly the same thing, and the value for me is that my actual income statement, balance sheet and cash flow are just much more accurate than other methods and therefore improve decision making (e.g. in a previous job I paid for work expenses on my personal card and was reimbursed from work, other solutions would make it look like I had was spending and earning an extra ~$50k-100k/year Vs with gun cash I just booked it all to a balance sheet account, which accurately reflected reality)
DrudgeCorporate
I run reports monthly to see where I'm putting my money. I used to follow a strict budget but that was way too rigid for me and would sometimes put me in a rock a hard place. So now I just spend as I'm comfortable and adjust in the future months.
If you own a business or do work on the side where you are 1099'd then it makes it way easier to send your books to your accountant so they aren't asking for information.
mcjiggerlog
The answers to that are always going to be pretty personal. To me the small amount of time it takes is well worth it to have full insight into where money is coming and going.
prairiedogg
I was a Gnucash user for a decade before switching to beacount (https://github.com/beancount/beancount). Can't see myself ever going back.
seltzered_
I haven't been active on the beancount mailing list lately, but have been working to meld Fava and Beancount together in a vscode environment using Eclipse Theia, with the long-term goal of making Beancount and plaintext accounting feel more like a packaged, crossplatform app that doesn't require upfront programming experience to at least do manual entries.
This drive sorta came after using Beancount+Fava for a couple years and realizing Im the only one who could understand the accounting system and it'd suck if I needed to share it to family or start an organization with it.
Happy to hear if there's interest in such a thing. I'm the same guy that collaborated on bringing extensions to Fava a few years ago.
bogle
Plain-text accounting is great. I choose hledger for the accounts of a small side business that doesn't warrant hiring an accountant.
NoboruWataya
What are the advantages over beancount? I often consider switching myself because beancount (and PTA generally) looks cool, but I don't really have an actual reason to leave GnuCash.
rcMgD2BwE72F
Fava as a GUI is awesome too https://github.com/beancount/fava/
dorfsmay
The problem I have with gnucash is handling over data to an accountant to do yearly tax etc... for a small business.
I have written https://github.com/dorfsmay/gnucash_general_journal and it help somehow but it still is a lot of work for them and can be confusing if they're not willing to spend the time on it + time they spend is money they charge me.
I plan to change this to output to OFX sheets separating the different accounts, hoping it helps.
I'm surprised there are no standard for accounting data and would love to hear from accountants what would help them importing data in their systems.
jsmith99
Assuming you have posted everything to the correct accounts, the Trial Balance should be all they need. (Trial balance is a summary of the total on each account - checking that it sums to 0 is the key advantage of double entry book keeping.) If it doesn't, then perhaps the account structure isn't granular enough?
For the report you use, why don't you send a traditional general ledger and let them pivot it in excel by account (columns) and transaction number (rows)?
lettergram
Having used gnucash, I find a regular Google sheet with a Google form for entry better.
The main reason is anyone in my household whose spending can then add transactions. Further and more importantly, I can attach receipts to transactions. Given Google forms work on mobile I can literally take a photo and in a few clicks have everything added to my spreadsheet.
fipar
I used to do this for the reason you mention (anyone in the household can enter transactions), but since 2020 I’ve moved to gnu cash and the double entry accounting is the main reason. I admit I knew very little about accounting before, and gnu cash forces you to learn the basics of double entry in order to use it, so perhaps I could have done this with the sheet method, but I find it much easier to find errors this way. I “resolved” the problem for other family members by having them give me their receipts (for cash, otherwise I just get the info from the banks) and entering the transactions myself. While it does mean a bit more Work for me, we have better financial planning now so I feel it’s worth the trouble.
Another thing gnu cash helps me solve a lot easier than sheets is handling multiple currencies (I live in a country with its own currency but with part of the economy in USDs, notably cars and real estate, plus I earn in USD and some of my local purchases are done in local currency but using my US card). With gnu cash it’s dead simple to handle transactions and accounts in multiple currencies (I use 3), including having historical values available.
Not saying your method is wrong at all, of course, just wanted to offer the perspective from someone who apparently did the inverse migration you did.
lettergram
Yeah I agree, I generally like gnucash but the mobile receipt upload is really critical for me.
I do keep track of incomes, expenses, and transfers. A bit complicated setup initially but not bad
nukst
Wouldn't this do? https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v4/C/gnucash-help/trans-assoc.h...
jacoblambda
I really like Gnucash but I had to give up on it a while back due to limitations that likely will never be resolved. Instead I switched to hledger for the time being(which I may likely be moving away from soon due to the poor support for lots). The main issues revolved around dealing with multiple currencies.
One major limitation is that tracking cryptocurrencies without slow accrual of rounding errors is nigh impossible due to the precision limits set in place by Gnucash.
This of course is on top of the fact that Gnucash refuses to add support for adding additional currencies or commodities which requires tracking them like securities. The solution to this of course is to recompile Gnucash with the internal currency list modified but that breaks compatibility with all other Gnucash compatible apps unless you recompile those as well. And in general either workflow (recompiling or using the securities workflow) is just an unnecessary hassle to deal with when I want to track things other than cryptocurrencies like airline miles, cashback points, etc.
The other major issue I have is that the support for tracking price bases in multiple currencies is really not there yet. I'll likely be moving to another country in the next two years and I will need to be able to track gains across multiple currencies. Ultimately the difference will be small enough that it won't matter much for taxes but nonetheless I'd prefer to be able to maintain consistency in my books to the best of my ability.
I also just find the workflow for tracking unit prices to be clunky and awkward.
grepfru_it
>Gnucash refuses to add support for adding additional currencies or commodities which requires tracking them like securities
I found a post on the mailing list which describes this problem (and provides a solution). Can I ask for a reference of the refusal to better understand your concern?
gen220
Can you expand on "poor support for lots"?
I maintain a ledger with GNU Ledger; until now, I'd assumed hledger and GNU Ledger were basically at feature parity.
Can you not do something like this in hledger?
20 AAPL {$100.00} @ $151.28 ; [=2022-07-18]
corbet
For the curious, I took a fairly detailed look at GnuCash for business accounting a while back: https://lwn.net/Articles/731126/
txr
I tried GnuCash a long time ago but was not happy how convoluted the UI was, maybe have to give it another try.
After that I switched to MoneyMoney [1] which is just awesome to work with. It is mostly focused on the german market and directly supports import from most major german banks, sadly MacOS only.
lloydatkinson
There's some criticism of it here that I just found while evaluating if it's any good for personal use. https://www.reddit.com/r/GnuCash/comments/o4s1bx/im_starting...
balderdash
I think the complaints are fair, but I’d frame them differently.
It serves the power user/technically adept individual user, and the very simple corporate user (e.g. books for an entity that holds an investment property, personal consulting business) quite well, but think commercial software is the much better solution for basic individuals and SMBs+
For individuals with any sort of modest complexity double entry accounting is the only solution and it’s great at that.
skirmish
Anybody know how to do an equivalent of MS Money cash flow forecasting in Gnucash? I really miss it. It should plot account balance assuming already entered future transactions and repeating transactions happen as scheduled.
Looks like this, and it really helps me plan:
https://preview.redd.it/908a4kg3ww931.jpg?width=879&format=p...
Here is another competitor promising this feature, would be great if Gnucash could do it somehow too:
turrini
Gnucash is wonderful, but since 2006 I've migrated to KMyMoney and never looked back. It also does forecasting.
BeetleB
Same here. KMyMoney's UI conveniences were significantly better than Gnucash when I switched over a decade ago.
(Also somewhat switched to ledger, but I still use KMyMoney for data entry and then run a script to convert the KMyMoney XML to Ledger).
fatcow
Huh there's a Balance Forecast report which does exactly this. It considers the Scheduled Transactions applicable to your accounts, and shows the forecasted balances.
balderdash
I haven’t done it, but you should be able to do that in gun cash by just chatting specifics and or grouped accounts from the cash flow statement?
WesleyJohnson
I really miss this aspect of MS Money as well. Thanks for turning me onto Kualto, I'll have to check it out for this feature alone.
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This comes up on the homepage consistently about every 6 months or so. I am not sure why.
Every time it does, it's obvious it has devoted fans and bitter enemies. The biggest problem with it as far as I can tell is the requirement for manual entry.
Given Europe and the UK have had Open Banking for years now, and a universe of apps automatically pulling, categorising and reporting transactions (including many incumbent banking apps) - I'm curios if this is a US-only phenomenon - why would people use decade-old software instead of the latest in banking technology? Any users from Europe or UK?
Previous threads:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31219754
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20109545
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23237445