GnuCash 2.0.0 Released

tashanna writes "After a very welcome GTK2 conversion and some additional feature hacking, GnuCash has released version 2.0.0. Other notable changes include: 'OFX DirectConnect which can directly retrieve and import account statements over the Internet, a "Hide account" feature to keep a better overview of your current accounts tabbed window functionality, the ability to create budgets within GnuCash using your account data, support for Accounting Periods, the data file format has been improved with respect to international characters data files with international characters can be transferred to other countries flawlessly, GnuCash Help and Guide are now fully integrated with the GNOME Help system (Yelp).'"

Re:Great for...

[baadger]

...unless of course you plan to use it on Windows [gnucash.org].

Most of, and all of the best, 'Linux software' is available on Win32. Ports are made much more likely by open sourced code. So I think you made a bad assumption there :P

Re:Great for...

[pintpusher]

You can calculate all of the money you saved compared to buying Quicken!

which, with rapid sunsetting, subscription features and more, is not an insignificant amount.

Re:GNUcash

[gnuman99]

Double-entry accounting is the only way to fly in the money world. It is the only way to make sure you balance you transactions. For example, instead of having

Dentist         Expenses:Health     $200.00

You have,

Dentist         Expenses:Health     $200.00
                Liabilities:Visa              $200.00

Or even better,

Dentist         Expenses:Health     $200.00
                Expenses:Taxes       $15.00
                Liabilities:Visa              $180.00
                Assets:Cash                    $35.00

Then when your Visa comes in, you reconcile your transactions. This is much, much better than a checkbook register or other back of the napkin accounting methods. The point is that ALL transactions are balanced. Money in = Money out.

Re:Great for...

[generic-man]

$40 every three years is a significant amount of money? I've been using Quicken since version 1 (back when Linux was in its infancy) and I've never had to pay for any subscription features. Upgrading every few years is pretty inexpensive especially when you buy Quicken along with TurboTax. (Speaking of which, where's the open source USA tax program I've heard so much about?)

Re:And you thought physicists were boring

[eno2001]

Hear hear!! My method of accounting is simple:

1. Only one bank account (with a debit card) into which everything I make is direct deposited
2. No credit cards (they are EVIL)
3. Mentally remember how much you generally have in the account ($9786, OK, so I've got about $10,000 in the bank)
4. Confirm what you mentally think you have with your bank's automated phone system so that you have a fresh guess as to how much you've got
5. Never spend more than %50 of what you think you have in the account unless you have a REALLY GOOD reason
6. DO NOT bank online. Evar
7. Memorize the general amounts of your monthly charges, which should all be automatic withdrawals. ($54.99 for cable? OK so assume $60 a month)

In general it's all based on assumptions with a mental attitude that you have less than you actually do. So far it's worked wonders for my money situation in that I really don't have to think about it unless it matters at the moment. Because if there's one thing people like us HATE to do, it's thinking about money. Money is a nuisance in every way just as non-techs feel computers are a nuisance in every way. For those of you that have a strong interest in money, well... get help.

Re:What about us Brits?

[TTop]

I'm not sure what you're talking about here... GnuCash has built-in multiple currency support.

In my opinion, an important issue with GnuCash is that development is fairly slow due to a good chunk of the codebase being LISP, which limits the universe of developers that can work on it. Unless they've changed that with this new version (which would be great!). So it seems like the pace of development compared to other open source products of its age is fairly slow.

I'd like to see the reporting and graphing features fleshed out a bit more, these seem somewhat limited. All in all, though, it's a pretty nice program.

Re:Great for...

[Don853]

Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought he was making a joke about it being a free product.

Re:And you thought physicists were boring

[reed]

Um, get some loans! Then you will find it very useful to know what you owe, what you can pay off, how much interest you are paying, etc. You will be able to make much better decisions about what to pay off and how quickly.

However everyone should keep track of expenses though, even if just for a few months. Once you realize how seemingly small things add up (do you go out to lunch every weekday? do you only pay the minimum on your car/home/college loan?), when you could be savinig for whatever your higher priority goals are.

Re:Any sarge backports available?

[pedalman]

I'd like to try this out. GnuCash seems like a good foundation for keeping track of finances, but past versions haven't been user friendly enough for non-accountants like myself.

Even if you are a non-accountant, you really should take a course in accounting fundamentals. After I did that, GnuCash makes much more sense to me (now that I understand basics in accounting).

Any software app is just a tool. You really need to understand what the tool is doing. If this is too much trouble, then you should go ahead and pay an accountant or bookkeeper to do this job for you.

Re:And you thought physicists were boring

[Bushwuly]

Good luck buying a car, or a house.

Unfortunately today, the costs of purchasing such major items necessitate the usage of credit. My mother at 49 is unable to get a loan to fix her house, because she's paid in cash her entire life and has no credit history. She'll just have to save up until she has enough, right?

While I appreciate the simpleness and ease of what you're promoting, fact is unless you are independently wealthy or have no interest in having a family (how are you paying for the kids' college?), you have to have some form of credit.

People like us? Sounds rather elitist...

(By the way, I gave up a career in IT to work with kids, so I'm pretty sure I don't have a strong interest in money.)

Re:Great for...

[plague3106]

I wouldn't bother; I switched from the last 1.8 release earlier this year for MS Money 2006; MS Money beats GC by a longshot. From the summary (since the site is down), none of the features I wanted were added.

Re:How well supported by banks?

[devilsbrigade]

Bank of America doesn't support anything but MS. I can't even open my account in firefox using IE TABS. Terrible terrible layout, and very annoying habbit of crashing when i am about to pay bills. If i wasn't so lazy i'd consider switching banks.

I have used both; I prefer GnuCash over KMyMoney

[KWTm]

I've been using GnuCash for about a year now, and have also tried out KMyMoney. I have no financial training background and use it for personal finances only.

Although I am a KDE fan and prefer KDE apps on my Kubuntu desktop, I went back to GnuCash because their double-entry accounting system is more rigourous and more powerful. The equivalent in KMyMoney is categories for each transaction, but not only are the categories not well implemented (you have to drill down into the transactions to display the category of each), but it is less flexible. In the same way that Unix treating non-files just like files (e.g. devices, processes, etc.) makes it more powerful, GnuCash's double-entry system lets you treat categories as actual accounts.

However, KMyMoney's interface is quite polished. I think KMyMoney (v0.8) is where GnuCash v0.8 would be, and over time it will catch up to GnuCash. The two convert files between them quite easily, so I plan to easily switch to KMyMoney if/when it overtakes GnuCash.

Note: As someone else has pointed out, "double-entry" does NOT mean you have to type it in twice. It means each transaction answers two questions: 1. where did the money come FROM? 2. where did the money go TO?

I am looking forward to GnuCash v2 appearing in the Ubuntu repositories.

One thing I wish GnuCash had is a redefinable keyboard interface and configurable fonts.

I mentioned some other things in a previous comment of mine about GnuCash, here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=189954&cid=156 34117 [slashdot.org]
I talk about how I use GnuCash in a lazy way, and how they have an excellent tutorial that teaches accounting basics as well as specifics of using the program. Never realized accounting could be that interesting. I won't repeat all that, since you can just go back and read my comment.

I enter things manually--you should too!

[Noksagt]

If you enter your statement in manually, you can then reconcile the downloaded statements. Most of the commercial apps encourage this behavior in their documentation, even if no one actually does it. This way, you can catch bank errors. It does happen. Not very frequently, but it does happen. GnuCash (and presumably the commercial apps) have completion based on past entries, so manual entries don't need to be that slow.