GnuCash 1.9.0 Released

Grendel Drago writes "The GnuCash team have released GnuCash 1.9.0. After literally years of waiting, GnuCash is now a GTK2 application. The current version is unstable, and testers are needed."

Finally

FTFA:
...might crash unexpectedly at any point during runtime.

Finally...software that is a perfect fit for my finances.

Re:Finally

From TFA:

The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 1.9.0 aka "We're gonna make it!", the first of several unstable 1.9.x releases of the GnuCash Open Source Accounting Software which will eventually lead to the stable version 2.0.0. This release is the very first of the gtk2-based GnuCash series, and is intended for developers and adventurous testers who want to help tracking down all those bugs that are still in there.

Just what I needed

A buggy, unstable money management program... BRILLIANT!

Re:With a web browser

Well, we use gtkhtml for rendering the reports, which emit html. While we used to have it setup to do "arbitrary" browsing, I'm pretty sure that's not working in 2.0. It [abritrary browsing from w/in GnuCash] is certainly not a direction the current devs are interested in going.

Re:Just what I needed

Microsoft Money?

Years of waiting...

Who's been waiting? I liked the application the way it is. With something as important as finacial tracking, there's no way I'd want to test it. I don't need a pretty ui to tell me I'm broke.

Re:Years of waiting...

The gtk1 libraries are soon simply not going to be distributed by distros, and with them software that depends on them. I too was fine with the UI, but we (GnuCash) would rather keep being distributed.

FINALLY!

I've been waiting for this FOREVER. Another alternative for Linux is Moneydance [moneydance.com], a java app that apparently spoofs Windows quicken online banking on Macs (or Linux)..

It would be nice for someone to do a mini-review or comparison of the different FOSS or FOSS-friendly financial packages, because frankly, I'm ready to leave Intuit.

Oh, and speaking of which--y'all know that you can file your taxes for free [irs.gov], right? Or at least 70% of Americans can. Down from 100% last year, but still something.

W

Re:FINALLY!

Ask, and you shall recieve:

1. The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I) [lwn.net]
2. The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Personal Finance Managers, Part 2 [lwn.net]

Courtasy of the always great LWN [lwn.net]. They are from September of last year.

Re:Financial programs

I don't see any way of conversing with my bank, though

Gnucash supports QIF and OFX import.

or commercial database (currency exchange, etc).

It also has various places to download current price data like this--I get my stock prices this way.

I'm not saying GnuCash is bad - it's very good at what it does, it's just not doing enough for what I'd want.

It does more than you give it credit for.

Re:FINALLY!

It would be nice for someone to do a mini-review or comparison of the different FOSS or FOSS-friendly financial packages, because frankly, I'm ready to leave Intuit.

I maintain the FW Finance FAQ: Free and Open Source Finance Applications [fatwallet.com], which (1)offers this, (2)links to other (usually more detailed) comparisons, and (3)offers ongoing discussion on the topic.

Ask Bill

Once it works for him, it certainly works for all of us.

I Am Really Interested In Looking This Over

Since it is slashdotted, here are some excerpts from the site:

The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 1.9.0 aka "We're gonna make it!", the first of several unstable 1.9.x releases of the GnuCash Open Source Accounting Software which will eventually lead to the stable version 2.0.0. This release is the very first of the gtk2-based GnuCash series, and is intended for developers and adventurous testers who want to help tracking down all those bugs that are still in there.

What's New in GnuCash 1.9.0?
o Welcome to GnuCash 1.9.0 aka "We're gonna make it!" the first of several unstable releases of the GnuCash Open Source Accounting Software which will eventually lead to the stable version 2.0.0. This release is the very first of the gtk2-based GnuCash series and is intended for developers and adventurous testers who want to help tracking down bugs.
o WARNING WARNING WARNING - Make sure you make backups of any files used in testing versions of GnuCash in the 1.9.x series. Although the developers go to great lengths to ensure that no data will be lost we cannot guarentee that your data will not be affected if for some reason GnuCash crashes in testing these releases.
o PLEASE TEST TEST AND TEST SOME MORE any and all features important to you. Then post any bugs you find to bugzilla http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Gn uCash [gnome.org]
o If you have the urge to help beyond testing please get involved in the discussions on the GnuCash mailing lists which you will find at http://www.gnucash.org./ [www.gnucash.org] We especially need people to help with updating the documentation as all texts refer currently to the 1.8.x series. Please see http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Development [gnucash.org] on how to get involved.
o PS I'm not going to list the many features changed or updated in this release because obviously there is so much that has changed.
Caveats

Caveats for testers:

* Any 1.9.x version might crash unexpectedly at any point during runtime. If you test some serious work in a 1.9.x release, make sure you hit "Save" after ever non-trivial workstep.
* Keep in mind that features which are not used in everyday work might crash unexpectedly at all times. This includes but is not limited to: graphical reports, scheduled transaction editor, price editor, financial calculator, OFX/QIF/HBCI import.
* Especially all the new features might crash instantly on testing. This applies in particular to any of the budget-related features. We may always decide to disable such new features for the initial 2.0.0 release, and re-enable them in a later release.
* The documentation is completely outdated. All help texts usually only refer to the 1.8.x series; please expect all descriptions in the help texts to be totally wrong when applied to the upcoming 1.9.x series. Everyone is invited to help improve the documentation; see http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Development [gnucash.org] on how to get involved.

How can you help?

* Testing: Test it and help us discover all bugs that might show up in there. Please enter each and every bug into bugzilla at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Gn uCash [gnome.org]
* Translating: The new release comes with plenty of new translation strings. If you consider contributing a translation, we invite you to test this release already, but please keep in mind that we are not yet in our string freeze phase. Please check http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Translation_Status [gnucash.org] for updates on this, as we recommend to wait for the string

GnuCrash?

Am I the only one who read GnuCrash?

GNUCash Ported Elsewhere?

I've been using GNUCash on Linux for awhile, and have wanted to also use it on Windows, as I've found it to be better than Quicken and the like. I looked for a Windows port, but the only thing I found were some messages saying something to the effect of "Wait until it's on GTK2."

With this news, it looks like a port might finally be reachable. This may be the next great OSS app that I can show off to friends and family, and I'll be able to use it on my Windows laptop. Here's to the GNUCash team for all their hard work!

Re:GNUCash Ported Elsewhere?

>I'm not sure how many extraneous libraries GnuCash 1.9 relies on...

If it's anything like the 1.8 version, it relies on at piles of esoteric packages [gnucash.org]. Why this program has significant portions written in scheme (of all things!), I will never understand.

I use the program, but it requires extraordinary care and maintenance. There was an issue with debian package dependencies sometime last year which completely broke gnucash for weeks. It's simply poor software design. Now I run it within a vmware player image which never gets updated, so I can be sure that it'll start tomorrow.

Re:GNUCash Ported Elsewhere?

wik, the GnuCash developers agree. We've been focusing very intentionally and narrowly on getting the gtk/gnome2 port out the door w/o many other changes to minimize risk, but once this release is out, I think you'll see some large simplifciations of the codebase.

Special Computer

Maybe Bill can finally have his taxes processed on a 'normal' computer now that GnuCash 1.9.0 is out?

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/01/141823 3 [slashdot.org]

KMyMoney

I gave up waiting and switched to KMyMoney [sourceforge.net] about a year ago. It did everything that my relatively simple personal finances require, plus supports nifty stuff like using KIO slaves to load and save its data files (so I can use sftp:// [ftp] from work to view my checking account on my home machine).

Now, I have nothing bad to say about GnuCash. It's a good program and served me well when I used it. I only mention KMyMoney as an alternative worth considering.

Re:KMyMoney

I don't want to drag along all the KDE cruft just to run a money management app.

Good point. A well-written money management app would implement its own widget toolkit, graphing engine, database backend, network stack, C library, and floating point handler. After all, why leverage the work of thousands of others when you can re-write it all, poorly, yourself?

Don't be a jackass. No reasonable size application is written from scratch anymore. The KMyMoney folks decided to use the KDE framework, just like the GnuCash group used all the "Gnome cruft" instead. If you want something totally minimal, perhaps I could introduce you to vi, bc, and grep. Wait - scratch that - bc depends on ncurses and readline. It may not be "pure" enough for someone of your discriminating tastes.

Woohoo!

GNUCash is a *fantastic* finance tool. I use it every day to keep track of my tech consulting businesse's bank accounts, expenses, liabilities, and so on. It's absolutely great. It's so nice having tools like this that not only gives you equal (or greater) power than it's commercial alternatives, but is free (as in beer) so small and new businesses don't have to pay an arm and a leg to simply track their small business finances!

Horray!! Thank you, GNUCash team!!

Switched to Monedance last March...

...and haven't missed GnuCash one bit. As a personal finance manager, GnuCash sucks. Moneydance is easy to use and comes with a decent default account to get a new user started. Moneydance is well worth the minimal price tag if you need to keep track of your personal finances. If I needed to manage a small business I might re-consider GnuCash, but I'm not sure. I might look at other alternatives based on my prior experience with GnuCash.

http://www.moneydance.com/ [moneydance.com] if you are interested.

The Kot

Here is a little example from the Gnucash source code:

char *
libgncmod_tax_us_LTX_gnc_module_path(void) {
#ifdef LOCALE_SPECIFIC_TAX
const char *thislocale = setlocale(LC_ALL, NULL);
if (strncmp(thislocale, "de_DE", 5) == 0)
return g_strdup("gnucash/tax/de_DE");
else
#endif
return g_strdup("gnucash/tax/us");
}

In plain English, this means if you know only your little backyard, then there is just US. Otherwise your world may include Germany, and the rest is, of course, US. Now, some people may find this funny. Others might cry. I am just confused. How can they write such code? It should read if Germany ... else if US ... else if ... else UNKNOWN, STOP! (or use perhaps a switch/case/default statement).

The last time I put numbers like the shown 5 into code was almost three decades ago in a Basic program. I have seen much better GNU software and hope someone removes the word GNU from this project's name.

No offense, but I thought financial planning software should comply with higher standards.

Re:The Kot

You're not fairly depicting the situation. Let's take a look at the source in question. Sadly the SVN server seems to be crushed at the moment, but this is representative [gnucash.org]. The filename is "gncmod-tax-us.c". The header reads "module definition/initialization for us tax info" Conclusion: this isn't a module intended for general consumption, but is US specific.

So, what's German tax information doing in there? Let's look a little further into the file where this exact same technique is repeated in another function... This is a very simple hack that loads the (new, special) German tax definition file in a German locale, or (default) loads the previous US tax file. */

A clear answer: this is a hack not really intended for general consumption. I'm guessing someone is experimenting with integrating the German data, but it isn't quite ready yet. LOCALE_SPECIFIC_TAX may be a "this is under development and will hopefully eventually work, but not now" setting. Little unused hackery and experiments live in most mainstream code, commented or #ifdefed out. It's fairly common in proprietary software because the end user has little to no chance of learning that they're there.

It looks like this little hack is present, if no enabled, in the trunk of their repository. That's not good and it should probably be removed (or marked more clearly so it doesn't accidentally ship). But it's hardly a Major Problem.

the end of dependence nightmares

Those who never tried building some of the previous GnuCash releases from scratch probably won't appreciate how monumental this is, but this version builds and runs on a stable Debian system without any updated libraries installed.

Previous versions were terribly difficult to build due to dependences on specific versions of rarely-used libraries. As a result, GnuCash was always late getting packaged for Linux distributions, and the delays likewise probably greatly reduced its adoption by users. The situation probably didn't help the development community's growth much, either.

I've used GnuCash for years, though, and I'll be happily beta testing this version (while keeping a copy of my finances in 1.8 at the same time). Great work, and thanks, guys!

Not happy with any of them

I've been into Personal Finance Manager appliction for a while. Just for fun, because now that i actually make money i would like to manage my accounts in a proper way. Unfortunatly i've found that not to be easy at all.

Tried with:
GnuCash
Quicken
and now with MS Money

None of them really do what i want.

GnuCash had double entry accounting which i think is just much to manage for my personal finances. Support to import transaction was incomplete back then (only QIF format worked, and QIF is a PoS). Now it seems that they improved on that but still the double entry system makes me nervous.
Quicken is a buggy, ad invested piece of software. Whenever you click on a "function" you're send to some third party website. Their move to not allow import of QIF for certain types of accounts gave me the rest and i quit.
Money is not as ad invested, but buggy as well. But right know i still kinda like it, except that some general functionalities are missing that i really would like to see in the future.

What's missing in all of these PFM's is that they don't take stupid work away from me, they should help me, not give me more work than necessary.
Example: My Payee information that i download in the transactions of the banks looks like encrypted bullocks to me. There has to be a way to name these things in user friendly way.
The automatic categorization of transaction lacks functionality as well. It should be possible to define rules. Like: i went to Safeway at noon on a weekday -> Lunch Category, otherwise Groceries
Furthermore i like to have the whole thing setup as a service on my computer, it wouldn't take too much... The service would then automatically log into my bank accounts everyday and download latest transactions. Maybe even sent me an e-mail or text message that i should maybe not use credit card XYZ anymore, because i'm about to bounce the credit limit.
There is more and i just wish i could see any sort of progress in their yearly releases, but i've given up on that.

I don't get it, people!

What is wrong with all (most) of you?? All I see are flames here, toward GNUCash, how blah blah, it's unstable, blah blah, use KMyMoney, blah blah, the code is lame... I've been using it for 2 years straight and haven't had a problem ONCE. No database corruption, no corruption of any kind. THERE is your proof that GNUCash won't fuck up your finances.

I've learned so much about finances with GNUCash it's amazing - much more, I'm sure, than using some other program. The layout is very LOGICAL - maybe not the easiest, or prettiest (1.9 will probably fix the prettiness though) but crap... aren't we all about the functionality? Using "accounts" instead of "categories" is really cool IMHO - it allows so much more flexibility with what you're doing and doesn't corner you into doing things one certain way - it just teaches you how things are done.

Give me the name of another financial program that's able to track BUSINESS finances (not just personal), other than GNUCash. Now sit down, shut up and eat your beans!

GO NINERS! =p

"Release"

FTFA:
        * Any 1.9.x version might crash unexpectedly at any point during runtime. [...]
        * Keep in mind that features which are not used in everyday work might crash unexpectedly at all times. This includes but is not limited to [...]
        * Especially all the new features might crash instantly on testing. [...]
        * The documentation is completely outdated. [...]

after years of waiting, couldn't the developers have spent a couple more months to make it a bit more stable?

another great GTK holdover

so should I hold my breath that XMMS will follow suit?

If cross platform is important.

In the meantime jGnash [sf.net] has reached a level where I can have a .jar of it on my usb stick and balance my checkbook on any machine under any OS. Darn useful. It still isn't quite as nice as Quicken, but it is completely transparent in the way that it does work.

Whatever computer you run it on stores enough info in your home directory so it automatically opens your account file from the stick too of course. Good news is that it can import GNUCash files.

Projects like gaim have taken gtk2 based apps and ported them to here and everywhere, but that's only due to rampant popularity (and some Google support). Even then, I would need to actually store 3 binaries on the usb stick, and at that point I am wasting more space and time trying to find the right icon to click on.

I would say that overall GnuCash still has the most features, so if you're an aspiring accountant then... go for it.

Web Version

Quickbooks Pro has a web based version that's pretty nice. Pros: great tech support. Cons: $25/month and only works in internet explorer.

I would pay a monthly fee for a standards compliant web based version of Quicken.

When Reporting Bugs...

Please attach your data file, including all bank account and credit card information. Thanks.

I use GnuCash

I use GnuCash and I like it, it is really a great tool. Kudos to developers for 1.9.0!

I waited for THIS?

After literally years of waiting, GnuCash is now a GTK2 application. The current version is unstable

Hell, not even Microsoft can do it that bad. This sucks.

Mac binaries?

I wonder if they or someone else will release Mac binaries finally?

Yes, I know you can install GnuCash using Fink, as that's what I do currently. But it would be so much more convenient to be able to download a standalone GnuCash.app like you can with Gimp, Frozen Bubble, OpenOffice, AbiWord, and others.

Donating to the Gnucash project

I've been using Gnucash for close to two years now. It was the final step to me ditching my Windows install, since I was using Quicken before.

Gnucash isn't perfect, but it's got everything I need to keep track of things. I do all my entry manually, although I have imported a few times just testing (I prefer my own formatting and such and don't care which gas station, etc., just that it was a gas station).

I figure if I'd been upgrading Quicken versions, I'd have spent at least $50. Plus, I would like be able to link to a Windows port on my Free GPL Programs [roysdon.net] page which I list all the apps I use that others should check out on Windows.

I decided to donate [sourceforge.net] to the cause. Hopefully others who use Gnucash will consider tipping the developers [sourceforge.net]. I'm sure even $5, especially if it's dozens of folks, will help motivate them.

I wish I had the time to bug-test v1.9, but I don't, so I'll tip a little more ;-)'

Free, my arse!

There was a /. article about two weeks ago about Novell listing apps to be ported or something like that and at the top was Quicken/Quickbooks, which I use and am well pissed off that I can't get it to work on Linux.

One reply suggested that GnuCash was a viable alternative to quicken. My problem with GnuCash (or really with Quickbooks) was that I couldn't export the accounts from Quickbooks into GnuCash. Well anyway, at the time of the Novell article, we had just hit our year end, so we had P&L and Balance sheets for everything.

So, perfect time to try GnuCash, just resetting everything off the Balance Sheet. Anyway, through this process I discovered that Quickbooks had 'lost' some of my previous VAT payments. Added them all up - £400 for me (don't worry I triple checked - no messing with the tax man). So GnuCash wasn't free for me - they actually paid me to use it. Cheers, GnuCash!

I miss the simple 'VAT Report' from QuickBooks - it's quite tricky in GnuCash. But if it was costing me £400 - I can handle the minor inconvenience.

I'm really looking forward to the 1.9.0 - hopefully, some more of the inconveniences will disappear and maybe the interface will be a little less GTK1.

Quicken 2004 on Crossover

I've been using Quicken 2004 on linux through crossover for a while now. I'm very satisfied with it. It is stable enough for me to do everything I need to do. I see little to no reason at all to use GUNCash until it is stable enough.

Suitable for Europe?

I am searching for a replacement package for our small charity in Brussels. My main concern is that the authorities here have quite clear guidelines for reporting our finances - they dictate account codes for example. To do quaterly VAT returns we need to know some precise details for some precise forms.

My question is are the FLOSS accounting packages up to this. Can the/have they been customised for the accounting systems here in Europe?

Any ideas/help please!

"currently unstable"

Just like everything that uses GTK.

Re:Where I come from it's called a failure...

Where I come from, you're called a motard.

Re:Not a M$ Windos fan but.....

I bought Quicken Deluxe 2006. And, I started entering in a bunch of data. I found a flaw where if you enter data quickly by tabbing through the boxes, it will eliminate the categories you need for reporting taxes..

I spent about 2 hours talking to an Indian guy over chat who barely spoke English who could not help me. He switched me over to a hispanic girl who spoke even less English at me for another 3 hours. Seriously.. both spoke horrible English. About three-fourths of my effort went to trying to communicate with them. Also, they knew shit about Quicken. It was easy to tell I knew more about it than them - just they were there as 'support' for idiots only or something.

Then, I called in the next day and spoke with person after person for another three hours. Each time, I had to duplicate the problem on my end, reinstall Quicken, duplicate the problem again.. and show them how to duplicate it. They duplicated it and still could not tell me how to fix it. They said they will send it to the development team. That was a month ago.. Hopefully they can fix this before tax season.

Whereas, in open source, if there was a problem like this, I could probby get one of the developers to issue a minor quickfix in a matter of days..

Hopefully there's a way to convert all my current data (about 50 hours of entry worth) into GnuCash's format. I'm definitely willing to give it a try..

Re:Where I come from it's called a failure...

Where I come from it's called a failure

Holy *Crap*. It's a development version, jackass. The whole point is for other developers to try it out and report the problems. Writing accounting related software sucks, and they're improving the situation (or at the least, trying). Cut 'em some slack!

Re:Where I come from it's called a failure...

Come on... they've just done a major conversion, and now it's testing time. OF COURSE it's going to crash. Why not channel your criticism into more constructive uses of your time and help with the testing?

Re:Where I come from it's called a failure...

I have been using GNUcash 1.8.X for some time and it has never crashed. I think the point is that 1.9.X is unstable because it has been converted to GTK2, not that the whole GNUcash application is unstable. The waiting part refers to the fact that everyone has been waiting for the GTK2 conversion to happen, since previously the project has stuck with GTK1. I would suggest doing some research and using the program before making such innane comments.

Re:Buggy financial software?

A 'real Linux financial suite'? Try SQL Ledger.

Re:So...

No, but somewhere down the road, I would suspect that one of the tax companies are going to get smart and offer their tax stuff on OSS using gnucash. That would allow them to pick up a number of customers that Turbotax does not support.

Re:Where I come from it's called a failure...

Uh-huh. And I suppose when you hear "Microsoft releases buggy beta version of Vista", or "prototype car doesn't pass crash testing" you complain about that too.

Re:cool!

FWIW, Rob hasn't been a lead developer or even working on the project for a few years now.

Re:Where I come from it's called a failure...

You forgot to close your italics tag. Where I come from, that's called a failure.

Perhaps they mean unstable like Debian means unstable: development release that changes often.