GnuCash 5.9 Released

I use GnuCash for business accounting and it does what I need. I don't use QuickBooks as VC's recommend in blog posts. QB has some convenient features, but that is not enough for me to pay the price QB is asking. I don't need VC money or a CPA.

I haven't tried using GnuCash with Sqlite, but I would like to experiment when I get the time. Is it reliable?

I used to be a technical/functional engineer for Oracle EBS, so I dealt with very complex schemas that interlinked with each other especially in the sub-ledgers.

I've always toyed with the idea of adding Revenue Recognition functionality to GnuCash but am too busy to do so. Perhaps after seeing the schema in Sqlite I can take a shot at it.

Cheers

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 euro, etc) you need to type everything again and again without good suggestions, based on your previous history. Such suggestions could be very sophisticated, taking counterpart and other parameters and suggest "food:bread" and price by letters "br" if counterpart is "Lidl" or "clothing:bra" and other price if counterpart is "Victoria Secret", for example, but, alas, nothing I've tried, support this.

Really, old (PalmOS 3.0!) Pocket Money was a breeze, and everything else, Desktop or Mobile, is much, much worse in this aspect.

Also, I think, that when you have all you transactions vrty detailed, it is better to have nested "categories" and not nested "accounts". It is almost cosmetic difference, but it is strange for me to have "cache" and "food:meat:pork" as same type of objects. I don't transfer money to "food:meat:pork", I spend money for it. I transfer money to the shop, not to the product! As far as I know, professional accounting systems doesn't have account for each asset of the firm, like different accounts for monitors, laptops, computers and (computer) mices.

Maybe, I don't find it yet? Any suggestions?

I don't like the GNUcash model very much, it is a bit fiddly to use, and is pretty hard to get the right stats I want out of it. I've used and settled on several other packages in the past.

But GNUCash existed when I first got a job decades ago.

GNUCash exists today.

I don't think any other package really matches the endurance.

I tried it years ago but finally settled on HLedger. Like GnuCash, I own and control my data, but with HLedger I have an ability to go in and correct or change something (and not in a "accounting-appropriate" way) in bulk just by editing it in Sublime Text. Then again, my use case is pretty basic and not mission critical so YMMV.

I use GnuCash for the accounting of my hackerspace. It was either this or a site called "wave" which the treasurer of a nearby makerspace recommended. After signing up for wave and playing around, I still wasn't sure. A few weeks later I decided I would use wave, but then I found they had locked my account for no reason. GnuCash it is!

It's good software! I eventually wrote code that dynamically links with the libgnucash library so I can auto-generate monthly invoices for the member's dues.

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-garden compared to plain-text tools.

The plain-text format requires more work at first, but after you get the hang of it (and provided you have some background in scripting software) it is awesome.

GnuCash holds a special place in my heart. My first couple years out of college, running a very tight budget on a lean income. Every time I shopped I'd bring my receipt home and enter it diligently on the ledger. Everything reconciled always. It was a ton of work :)

As a freelance consultant from Sweden I looked at GnuCash several times over the past 10+ years but it was always the same issue.

It's not tailored for our economy and our revenue services.

Here in Sweden if your revenue is below 3 million SEK/year, then you can use "simplified bookkeeping" (rough translation of "förenklat årsbokslut").

In practice it means I could write a very basic program to manage my expenses and income and just have it generate all the necessary numbers that I then enter manually into our revenue service's online app every year.

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 overall.

Ran a business with it, payroll, administered the 401k accounts, etc. Solid. Expense tracking good enough for a business with limited expenses, or background as a bookkeeper (my teenage job). But being able to generate balance sheet and profit&loss reports for my accountant, golden.

GnuCash 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 something that is A) simple and B) I control fully, beats everything else.

The principles of free software show, I guess.

GnuCash is really nice, and eventually it would have been my end game, but at some point numbers didn’t end up.

Everything was recorded correctly, but reports would show wrong numbers.

After migrating from GnuCash to beancount, I realized that some transactions where recorded with invalid currency conversion rates.

As someone who relocated recently, manage money in at least 3 currencies, and have an online business, I can’t handle it. I need everything to be explicit in order to avoid mistakes.

I kind of surprised to see lots of hatered to GnuCash. What are your usecases? I run cafe business in Japan, but it does everything I need.

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.

I tried to get into it several times but eventually came to the conclusion that it is, despite the unassuming name and the advertisement as a tool for personal finances probably more targeted at professional accountants or people who have some training in accounting, rather than just being a tool for tracking private finances in an intuitive way.

I tried some time ago GnuCash after getting tired of plain text accounting.

I’m not sure what it was but I couldn’t get it working for me. Tried HomeBank afterwards and was blown away by how accessible it is in comparison.

I might give another try at GnuCash to track something like business/project expenses but it was rather hard to use for my personal finances.

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

GnuCash and KDE Money always seemed very similar to me. Why should I use GnuCash over KDE money?

How come no one mentioned ERPNext. It's open source, can be self hosted, free and biggest growing software in the market. It also scores high on user recommendations. I switched from GnuCash to ERPNext and it has been a blessing.

I've been using GnuCash for a few years now and it's been good. I was looking at other options, but every time I try to book Cryptocurrencies I turn around to GNUCash. Is there another option? Most recently I've tried Odoo (stems out of OpenERP (prev. TinyERP)) which I like because it's python based, has a web interface and runs on docker.

I wonder does anybody use GnuCash for s.r.o. (LLC/ Ltd.) business in Czechia? How is your experience with it, e.g. do you also do DPH (VAT)?

I know the aesthetic is part of the “simple” appeal, but it’s just inexcusable to not have a responsive (aka “mobile friendly”) site in 2024. It’s also a great example of why I don’t trust hand-rolled guis like this, if I can avoid it: the standards are standard for a reason.

How is gnucash?

I've been looking for a less data intrusive budgeting app. The other I saw was Firefly III.

Time to read the release notes and see if it fixes the stock price fetching at all.

I've used Gnucash for my personal finances for 15-20 years, except for some periods (e.g. a few years where I was unemployed and depressed). It gives me great control of every cent, I know exactly what I've spent where, and I even use it to plan ahead.

I use scheduled transactions for all my fixed expenses, and Gnucash enters them 100 days in advance. I manually enter my income, usually also 3 months in advance. My income is very predictable, but can of course vary a little. I then plan out how much to transfer on payday to my debit card account, my bills account, my savings account, etc. I enter any "random" bills (variable or unexpected expenses) as they show up. This allows me to see, in Gnucash, quite exactly how much money I'll have available at any point in time the next 2-3 months.

I keep every receipt for things I buy during the week, and every Sunday I have a routine. It's become a bit overkill, but I enjoy it. First I scan the receipts with a scanner app on my phone. Then I sync the scans to my computer using Syncthing. Then I enter each transaction and link it to the scanned receipt. My hierarchy of expense accounts are reasonably detailed, I'd say.

I've gone so far as to program useful shortcuts into a numpad, to make this process even easier. So for example, instead of Ctrl-A or whatever is the default for linking a transaction to a file in Gnucash, I have one convenient button on the numpad. Other buttons select different transaction views. For a while I even had a setup where I could RDP to a docker container with Gnucash, so I could use it while at the office. For this I'd also use Syncthing to sync my gnucash data between my desktop and the container.

Is it overkill to scan every grocery receipt and whatnot? Yes. Do I need all this historical data? No, not really. But it's somewhat interesting to scroll 3 years back and look at some random dates to see what I bought and what prices were like. It's also useful for tax purposes. And I'm a bit of a data hoarder ;) (I should add that I don't always keep the receipt - I often pay with Google pay and then if it's just food or coffee or something simple like that I just keep the notification until I can enter the transaction in Gnucash.)

The biggest thing this setup gives me is great peace of mind. I've struggled with anxiety and depression, and I've lived through times where I've had credit card debt and very little income, so money has been a big stressor at times. Now I have a reasonably well paid job in IT and no debt except student loan, so I could probably live well without Gnucash, but it's still a source of mental well-being, even comfort. I enjoy my weekly routine and micro-managing my money. Sometimes I just open Gnucash to look at how well I'm doing financially (not wealthy by any means, but my net worth is at least in the positive). Gnucash was also great for planning how to pay off my credit cards.

For personal accounting, MoneyManagerEx has a much simpler UI than GnuCash.