13 ms·

GnuCash

309 points by je_bailey 4y ago

sundarurfriend 4y ago
Does anyone have experience with Skrooge [1], the KDE equivalent of this? [1] https://apps.kde.org/skrooge/ https://apps.kde.org/skrooge/
- cricalix 4y ago
  I poked it, and decided I preferred kMyMoney. The latter has some quirks/bugs (some ledger entries lose the payee, but the relational data is still there - haven’t found a repro to report with), but is generally all I need to track something like 14 asset accounts in multiple currencies.
  - sundarurfriend 4y ago
    Thanks for the reply. Do you mean that kMyMoney is simpler and easier to use? I didn't even know kMyMoney was a thing until now, I'll give it a try.
plg 4y ago
With two busy working (and shopping) adults, a teenager, and a little kid, online shopping, cash, cards, etc, I think I would need to hire a data entry clerk to use something like this.
- yeetsfromhellL2 4y ago
  I felt the same way trying to use ledger. Apparently there's a way to import your CC charges from online banking CSVs, but I never tried it out. I ended up giving myself a weekly allowance and plugging that into the books at the end of the week. Things got a lot easier when I was dealing with broad budget categories instead of logging transactions for a single cup of coffee.
  - seltzered_ 4y ago
    I use beancount ( a plaintext accounting tool) and yeah, I feel it's a coherency challenge among developers who have different preferences around structure and workflow that makes it a challenge. The importers have historically erred towards being something the user writes on their own. But there's also some powerful helper tools for importing but they carry a different user experience than the other tool for financial reports & visualization. Im starting to think a unified experience (think vscode + built-in extensions) for it all might help align intentions and broaden the userbase of plaintext accounting.
  - spicybright 4y ago
    Just because someone reading might find use of this, but if you use Bank of America you can export your transactions relatively easily. 1. Login not on mobile (and also extend your browser winder size until the mobile mode is gone. Mobile mode changes how you login, because of course it does...) 2. Click one your bank accounts. 3. Click "Download", "Custom date range", from some time ago to today*. 4. Download as Printable Text Format This will give you a simple CSV file of all your transactions. I'm horrible with money, but still try to export all my transactions and merge them onto one spreadsheet so I can plan out money stuff as needed. * You can only download up to 6 months at a time, but you can go pretty far back in your banking history.
- Bluecobra 4y ago
  Yeah, it’s a lot of work. I used to manually budget with Google Spreadsheets but eventually threw in the towel and gave into Mint. I still have to go in and manually change certain categories or add tags, but it’s way less work than what I was doing before.
  - abhiyerra 4y ago
    I use Money for Excel. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/06/15/introducing-money-excel-easier-manage-finances/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/06/1... I found it easier to manage personal finances in a spreadsheet.
    - seltzered_ 4y ago
      Interesting, feels like they picked up on startups like Tiller ( https://www.tillerhq.com/ https://www.tillerhq.com/ )
  - wardedVibe 4y ago
    An alternative that isn't as scummy a company as Intuit is https://www.youneedabudget.com/ https://www.youneedabudget.com/
    - staindk 4y ago
      I'm sure this is less scummy than Intuit Mint but I did not like having to browse around for a good while to find a link to their pricing page - even though it is just at the standard url.tld/pricing[1]. Companies that push their 'free trial' without readily mentioning what their product will cost when the trial runs out annoy me. $15/month is a lot amount of money in my country. [1] https://www.youneedabudget.com/pricing/ https://www.youneedabudget.com/pricing/
- massysett 4y ago
  I have my own SQLite-centered setup with a Haskell UI to glue it together. I have (relatively) simple programs that parse incoming CSVs or OFX from the banks, so there is practically no data entry. (Not disagreeing with you though, as I have no idea how well GNUCash handles importing.)
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  I do essentially the same thing with a spreadsheet.
gotaquestion 4y ago
GnuCash only imports ancient quicken formats. The new Quicken formats (since about 2015) are not importable. I'd love to, but I can't restart a 32-year quicken file, so they got me. Plus I think the UI for GnuCash isn't as smooth as quicken (w.r.t. categories and accounts, they all blend together in a weird way, IMHO).
- SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
  I was going to say that maybe getting off a product owned by Intuit would be enough motivation but apparently Quicken has not been owned by Intuit since 2016! I had the same reaction as I did when I discovered that RAM pickups are no longer owned by Dodge.
  - rascul 4y ago
    > I discovered that RAM pickups are no longer owned by Dodge. That one got me awhile back. Ram was spun off in 2010, but they're both owned by Stellantis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_Trucks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_Trucks
  - danachow 4y ago
    Dodge hasn’t been an independent entity since 1928 and Dodge and RAM are still part of Stellantis (the thing that Chrysler morphed into). RAM truck VINs still to this day use the same Dodge manufacturing code and RAM trucks supply chain didn’t change, so this just seems like an internal rebranding. It’s not like Mazda or Volvo with Ford or something.
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  > I'd love to, but I can't restart a 32-year quicken file, so they got me. GnuCash is open source and this is hacker news… They don’t have some sort of exportable file format that both quicken and gnucash can understand? Which, of course, doesn’t help with the UI issues.
  - gotaquestion 4y ago
    You can export QXF and QMTF (and CSV) but the online QXF converters seem dubious... (not QFX, that's different). Although you have inspired me to spend some time examining the formats.
yeetsfromhellL2 4y ago
I'm surprised to see a GNU project that not only hosts their code on GitHub, but also has an official Facebook community. What gives?
- cinntaile 4y ago
  You probably need some pragmatism to stay relevant.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    I think that's why parent was surprised it was a GNU project.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  It doesn’t appear to be related to GNU Linux or other FSF related efforts. It just uses the license and the name.
  - yeetsfromhellL2 4y ago
    https://www.gnu.org/software/software.html https://www.gnu.org/software/software.html It's a GNU project.
    - fnordpiglet 4y ago
      You’re right! Thanks
spicybright 4y ago
Obligatory HN comment about the mobile site being bad: It's almost impressive how bad it is on my phone. The content takes up 2/3 of the page horizontally to make room for the logo on the side. I get GNU and it's culture are less about mobile and more about *nixy desktops/laptops/servers, but it takes more effort to break things like this than letting the browser do it's natural thing most of the time.
- massysett 4y ago
  The website probably predates the mobile era and no one has bothered to rewrite it since.
  - spicybright 4y ago
    Eh. It has viewport meta tags and the apple app icon markup. But you're probably still right, I'm sure at some point they just peppered those into all their pages to fix them at least a tiny bit.
nickjj 4y ago
I once wrote about using GnuCash as a freelance solo developer at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/using-gnucash-as-a-freelancer-to-track-finances-and-prepare-taxes https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/using-gnucash-as-a-freelancer.... I started using it in 2017 and still use it today. It's still really solid and makes filing quarterly taxes not too painful. In my opinion it's one of the best tools out there if you like your privacy and don't want to link your bank accounts to a third party service.
- abawany 4y ago
  Same here. Compared to the extractive noise of the intuit alternative, GnuCash just works to log transactions and generate statements necessary to file taxes and etc.
- nickjj 4y ago
  I didn't include this in my original reply but today is May 1st. Since GnuCash involves manually entering in transactions it's easy to think that'll take a ton of time. I just timed myself and it took 5 minutes to input everything for April 2022 into GnuCash. This includes all income and expenses (personal and business). I'm not even using GnuCash's automated feature for recurring payments too, so that 5 minutes includes manually inputting various subscription costs (I don't have a lot). This also includes a bunch of business related things (estimated tax information, a few income streams in their own "GnuCash Accounts" and a few expense streams in their own "GnuCash Accounts"). I do this by opening GnuCash and my bank's dashboard side by side and then running through last month's entries. Most banks support exporting CSVs and I'm 100% certain I could write a Python script to parse this and auto-import things into GnuCash but since the bank item descriptions for the same transactions change over time I don't want to risk it. The 1 hour per year of manually entering numbers (I copy paste the dollar amounts to reduce human error btw) gives me more confidence than writing that script. I also know to make that script robust enough to consider using it for real in a way that wouldn't require manually checking it would be quite involved. As soon as the script's results require manually checking it for accuracy then you might as well have input things manually without the script.
  - 4y ago
dang 4y ago
Related: GnuCash 4.7 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28666104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28666104 - Sept 2021 (11 comments) Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23237445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23237445 - May 2020 (319 comments) GnuCash: Open-source double-entry accounting software - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20109545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20109545 - June 2019 (100 comments) Using GnuCash as a Freelancer to Track Finances and Prepare Taxes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16857884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16857884 - April 2018 (184 comments)
adictator 4y ago
How does this compare with Actual that was open sourced just a couple of days or so ago? I think it's easy to make anything better than the super buggy mint.com.
neilv 4y ago
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 each day. Eventually I kept simplifying, especially in Expense accounts, eventually only distinguishing transaction categories by tax implications. I also stopped recording each individual little cash transaction. Instead, I occasionally counted the cash in my wallet, and added an "Expenses:Misc." transaction to make it match what GnuCash thought (given ATM withdrawals the bank import showed). I never did figure out a practical way to track Guideline.com 401(k) in GnuCash, and, the instant I could close the account, I rolled it over to Fidelity. Where tracking the prices and every dividend reinvestment of my ITOT and AGG was easy and almost fun. I'm currently taking a break from GnuCash for 2022, seeing whether a fancy assets&liabilities spreadsheet in Libre Office would be better. (While still saving the monthly OFX/QFX exports from my financial accounts, while I can, in case I ever need them.) Initially, the spreadsheet seemed to do what I want with less effort, but I'm finding that GnuCash might actually be less effort in practice for the level of up-to-date and historical charting that I have.
- yawaramin 4y ago
  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.
  - atmosx 4y ago
    How do you perform graph reporting and forecasting?
    - atgreen 4y ago
      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.
ericbarrett 4y ago
The GnuCash documentation is high quality and an excellent introduction to double entry accounting, with lots of great examples for e.g. stock sales.
johncs 4y ago
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 https://plaintextaccounting.com.
- moistly 4y ago
  Likewise, Beancount. https://beancount.github.io/ https://beancount.github.io/
  - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
    The Fava front-end for Beancount is great: https://beancount.github.io/fava/ https://beancount.github.io/fava/
- ninjin 4y ago
  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 https://www.ledger-cli.org
  - atgreen 4y ago
    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.
jen_h 4y ago
I've used GnuCash for 13 years now, for personal finances and two companies, and love it to death. There's something really satisfying when you see everything balance! The only issues I've had over all these years have been banks/credit cards that have weird idiosyncrasies in their file formats (lookin' at you, AmEx) that require you to remove the trailing white space (bad memory, I have a text file that reminds me what to do every time) or whatever and getting stock updates (gnc-fq-update) working again after upgrade. It's also really accessible. While slow and a little annoying, I can do almost everything with a keyboard instead of the mouse (unlike so much online tax software, which is a carpal tunnel specialist's dream).
- solarengineer 4y ago
  “tailing white space” - I wonder if a trim () on that input field would help.
  - jen_h 4y ago
    I found my caveats file! It was actually an errant newline at the end of each file. Gnucash should've known enough to strip it. And the other thing was a file that used `--` for deposits, so I have a note to 's/--//g' those files. I think that's the kind of thing that some of us see as a neat challenge to figure out and overcome; but for others, it becomes a barrier for entry. I still evangelize the heck out of Gnucash, though. It's so powerful...and not Intuit.
viceroyalbean 4y ago
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 calculation
- xupybd 4y ago
  If you get out of sync just put in fake transactions to get it to balance and start again.
- jldugger 4y ago
  My workflow: 1. Lots of scheduled transactions. Rent, cable bill, paychecks, car insurance premiums, quarterly estimated tax payments, etc. Any transaction you can expect and guess at can be a scheduled transaction. This really cuts down on the catch-up work. 2. Transaction import. A lot of what's left after #1 is the random unpredictable expenses go on a credit card, and most of those support OFX or quicken format data downloads. As you import that data, it should be able to match up official records with what you had written down, and if different "update and record." 3. Monthly reconciliation. At the end of the month, review all the statements you get with your records using the reconcile window. If I'm lazy, I can skip liabilities and investments for a month as long as my main checking account is correct and CC payments for next month reflect their most recent billing statements.
- kqr 4y ago
  Do you really need full double-entry accounting for personal finances? This usually boils down to either - you need it for tax/legal/bureaucratic purposes, or - you are really short on money and you need to keep track of it down to the last cent. When either of those two conditions are true, double-entry is amazing. If the above are not true (and it sounds that way based on your comment) then I would do it statistically. Determine how much time you would like to spend recording transactions. Let's say it's 1/11 of the time it takes when you are doing a full accounting. (Eleven is good because it's prime, so it's less likely to accidentally line up with cyclic transactions.) Enter all expenses/incomes only every eleventh day. Nothing the other days. You have to be really strict about this! Instead of entering the actual number, though, multiply it by 11. Tadaa! After a while, you have practically the same result but at a fraction of the effort (roughly three times per month instead of 30.) Note that the number you get will have some sampling error. For bonus points, you can calculate the size of this. Depending on how large the variation of your expenses is and how often you enter them, it's not unreasonable to get a sampling error where three standard deviations are ±50 % -- are you okay with a rough estimation like that? If not, you have to sample more often. More technical note: what I've described is actually a stratified sampling scheme, only once you've sampled a day, you do a full accounting of the transactions within that day. Depending on the practical structure of your transactions, you might find that you can optimise your sampling scheme (lower sample error and/or less effort) by selecting more days, but only entering one transaction from each day. Read up on sampling! It's powerful!
manifoldgeo 4y ago
I'm an avid user of GnuCash. Last I checked, their mobile app was basically abandoned (around 2018), and it had no way to use a SQL DB, even though the desktop can use SQLite3, MySQL, and Postgres [1]. So there was no easy way to use desktop AND mobile in a shared way. So, I made a small companion app called gnucash-helper [2]. It's a Python/Flask web app for doing the very basics of GnuCash, i.e. entering transactions, looking at their history, and checking balances. If you want to try it out, there's a demo of it on https://demo.checkyour.finance https://demo.checkyour.finance. The container it runs in is destroyed every 30 minutes, but that's enough time to play with it. It's very simple, but it does everything I need, to the point that I no longer have to open the desktop program. Your feedback is most welcome. I should say right now, though: it's more like beta software at this point. I haven't built the Docker container in a while, so the one on Docker Hub may or may not work. If anyone has any interest in contributing ideas or code to this, I would love to hear about it. Edit: A couple things I forgot to mention: - The backend for this is a .gnucash file that is saved in the sqlite file format. You can add your own into an S3 bucket, and this will write to it using Python's boto3 library. - There's no way as of yet to download the GnuCash file directly from the web app, but I would like to add that in the future. - The heart of this app is the Piecash Python library [3]. It lets you use Python to alter GnuCash files. References: [1]: https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v4/C/gnucash-guide/basics-files1.html https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v4/C/gnucash-guide/basics-files... [2]: https://github.com/bxbrenden/GnuCash-Helper https://github.com/bxbrenden/GnuCash-Helper [3]: https://github.com/sdementen/piecash https://github.com/sdementen/piecash
- ajvs 4y ago
  Great to see this. I stopped using GnuCash completely once the Android app stopped getting updates, but if this web app works well it might get me back into it.
- zikani_03 4y ago
  Nice! I have been using GnuCash for about a year now; moved on from an Excel workbook that got annoying to maintain. Been thinking of an API/Web interface (or Telegram bot) to quickly save transactions - so it's wonderful to see you built something in that can help in that direction! Guess I can look at the telegram bot part now :)
kayson 4y ago
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 needed. I stopped using Mint after a brief stint because of data privacy and security. No matter how many security claims they made, I just couldn't justify giving them my bank passwords in plain text. I suppose it doesn't matter as much for credit cards, but for my checking/savings accounts, a compromise would actually jeopardize my money. Apparently some of the big US banks are starting to roll out authentication APIs (e.g OAUTH) so it may be worth another look. It does seem like there's still room for a FOSS/selfhosted Mint clone that gracefully and automatically handles data import (I wouldn't even mind having to enter my banking passwords each time I want to update, to avoid storing them)
- kodah 4y ago
  A Mint clone would require that banks facilitate much more open access. Being centralized is a good position for Mint because all the financial institution has to do is trust Intuit.
- BeetleB 4y ago
  I use KMyMoney which has probably the same "support" as GnuCash for online banking. I now just download transacations from the institution (CSV, OFX, etc) and import the file. Many institutions charge extra for being able to pull automatically, but their export is free. Sounds like a pain but it isn't that bad.
  - brewdad 4y ago
    I've found that I appreciate the manual download and import process. It makes me look over each transaction more deliberately than I would if it were just an automated update. I've caught 3 or 4 fraudulent or erroneous charges over the past half decade because I'm forced to look at each charge on my credit cards. Probably 90-95% of my spending goes on a credit card and then gets paid off at the end of the month. GnuCash has been great for tracking everything. I'll have to look at KMyMoney too.
fires10 4y ago
I have tried GnuCash in the past. It was too complicated for my needs. All other budgeting software I thought was too complicated and complex for the average person. I use a spreadsheet to handle my budget. I keep it as a reminder that temporary solutions can become permanent. The file name is "planstemp". It was temporary more about ten years ago. I found using different banks depending on the purpose of the transaction the easiest way to keep track of expenses. I use one bank for regular monthly expenses and another for daily expenses. Regular expenses are predictable. If I was running a business, I keep that separate from personal.
ngcc_hk 4y ago
Sidetrack : Wonder can they do gnuCoin, openSourceCoin or even …
rushabh 4y ago
If you are looking for a modern free desktop accounting platform check out FrappeBooks - https://github.com/frappe/books https://github.com/frappe/books. Version 1.0 is round the corner.
- atmosx 4y ago
  Looks nice. Does this tool support multiple currencies?
  - rushabh 4y ago
    Not yet, you can add your comments here! https://github.com/frappe/books/issues/183 https://github.com/frappe/books/issues/183
- staindk 4y ago
  This looks very neat, thanks for the link. Seems more targeted towards small businesses/freelancers... wonder if that would make it less ideal for use in a personal finance context. FWIW I'm happily using a service called 22seven[1] that is backed by a big bank in my country (South Africa). It is super convenient and links to a bunch of different services so you can pull in all your investments etc. to track all at once (of course this means they track you too, but they were doing that before anyhow)... I just don't know for how many years it will stay updated, free, and available for use to people who bank at other banks (such as myself), so I'd like to at least plan for moving to a more open alternative when the time comes. [1] https://www.22seven.com/ https://www.22seven.com/
justsomehnguy 4y ago
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 the time is a thing which drived me to totally abandon the thing.
- KeepFlying 4y ago
  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.
  - iggldiggl 4y ago
    The workaround (or actually even the proper solution, as the money does need to be accounted for somewhere, doesn't it?) would be to have a "money in transit" account, wouldn't it? Though of course I guess it'd still be somewhat annoying having to manually split up transactions instead of things being handled automatically behind the scene with native support for that kind of thing.
  - zburatorul 4y ago
    You should adopt a similar solution https://github.com/redstreet/beancount_reds_plugins/tree/main/beancount_reds_plugins/effective_date#readme https://github.com/redstreet/beancount_reds_plugins/tree/mai...
2143 4y ago
I'm aware of the benefits of double entry bookkeeping, and tried to use GNUCash for a while. The fact that it doesn't have an official companion smartphone app (that I'm aware of) was the dealbreaker; I can go for weeks without touching my personal computer. Ultimately I've resorted to Google Sheets with a lot of formulae and data validation; I can now see all my incomes and expenses, the summary of all my accounts, expenses across different categories etc. I've been on this for a while now and it's been great. And Google Sheets sync to my smartphone as well. (I periodically manually backup all the important stuff separately, just in case Google blocks me). Also I'm not a huge fan of the UI. Still, I would've used GNUCash if I used my personal computer regularly.
cja 4y ago
UI text is painfully small and while keyboard-friendly it has too many annoyances
holtwick 4y ago
Receipts - for macOS, local database, automated content recognition, document management. Convenient commercial alternative to GnuCash to track expenses and income. https://www.receipts-app.com/ https://www.receipts-app.com/
petesergeant 4y ago
I switched a while ago to MoneyDance which is a very similar paid app. It’s OK. I have a lot of Perl code sitting about for unfucking various bank transaction exports into OFX, and I wonder how people who aren’t programmers manage
Tijdreiziger 4y ago
How does this compare against Beancount + Fava?
yrro 4y ago
I was an avoid GnuCash user until HSBC (my bank) stopped offering statement downloads in OFX format. I took a glimpse into the chasm of madness of trying to OCR their PDF statements and decided... no.

309 points by je_bailey 4y ago

Does anyone have experience with Skrooge [1], the KDE equivalent of this? [1] https://apps.kde.org/skrooge/ https://apps.kde.org/skrooge/

cricalix 4y ago
I poked it, and decided I preferred kMyMoney. The latter has some quirks/bugs (some ledger entries lose the payee, but the relational data is still there - haven’t found a repro to report with), but is generally all I need to track something like 14 asset accounts in multiple currencies.
- sundarurfriend 4y ago
  Thanks for the reply. Do you mean that kMyMoney is simpler and easier to use? I didn't even know kMyMoney was a thing until now, I'll give it a try.

plg 4y ago

With two busy working (and shopping) adults, a teenager, and a little kid, online shopping, cash, cards, etc, I think I would need to hire a data entry clerk to use something like this.

yeetsfromhellL2 4y ago
I felt the same way trying to use ledger. Apparently there's a way to import your CC charges from online banking CSVs, but I never tried it out. I ended up giving myself a weekly allowance and plugging that into the books at the end of the week. Things got a lot easier when I was dealing with broad budget categories instead of logging transactions for a single cup of coffee.
- seltzered_ 4y ago
  I use beancount ( a plaintext accounting tool) and yeah, I feel it's a coherency challenge among developers who have different preferences around structure and workflow that makes it a challenge. The importers have historically erred towards being something the user writes on their own. But there's also some powerful helper tools for importing but they carry a different user experience than the other tool for financial reports & visualization. Im starting to think a unified experience (think vscode + built-in extensions) for it all might help align intentions and broaden the userbase of plaintext accounting.
- spicybright 4y ago
  Just because someone reading might find use of this, but if you use Bank of America you can export your transactions relatively easily. 1. Login not on mobile (and also extend your browser winder size until the mobile mode is gone. Mobile mode changes how you login, because of course it does...) 2. Click one your bank accounts. 3. Click "Download", "Custom date range", from some time ago to today*. 4. Download as Printable Text Format This will give you a simple CSV file of all your transactions. I'm horrible with money, but still try to export all my transactions and merge them onto one spreadsheet so I can plan out money stuff as needed. * You can only download up to 6 months at a time, but you can go pretty far back in your banking history.
Bluecobra 4y ago
Yeah, it’s a lot of work. I used to manually budget with Google Spreadsheets but eventually threw in the towel and gave into Mint. I still have to go in and manually change certain categories or add tags, but it’s way less work than what I was doing before.
- abhiyerra 4y ago
  I use Money for Excel. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/06/15/introducing-money-excel-easier-manage-finances/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/06/1... I found it easier to manage personal finances in a spreadsheet.
  - seltzered_ 4y ago
    Interesting, feels like they picked up on startups like Tiller ( https://www.tillerhq.com/ https://www.tillerhq.com/ )
- wardedVibe 4y ago
  An alternative that isn't as scummy a company as Intuit is https://www.youneedabudget.com/ https://www.youneedabudget.com/
  - staindk 4y ago
    I'm sure this is less scummy than Intuit Mint but I did not like having to browse around for a good while to find a link to their pricing page - even though it is just at the standard url.tld/pricing[1]. Companies that push their 'free trial' without readily mentioning what their product will cost when the trial runs out annoy me. $15/month is a lot amount of money in my country. [1] https://www.youneedabudget.com/pricing/ https://www.youneedabudget.com/pricing/
massysett 4y ago
I have my own SQLite-centered setup with a Haskell UI to glue it together. I have (relatively) simple programs that parse incoming CSVs or OFX from the banks, so there is practically no data entry. (Not disagreeing with you though, as I have no idea how well GNUCash handles importing.)
commandlinefan 4y ago
I do essentially the same thing with a spreadsheet.

gotaquestion 4y ago

GnuCash only imports ancient quicken formats. The new Quicken formats (since about 2015) are not importable. I'd love to, but I can't restart a 32-year quicken file, so they got me. Plus I think the UI for GnuCash isn't as smooth as quicken (w.r.t. categories and accounts, they all blend together in a weird way, IMHO).

SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
I was going to say that maybe getting off a product owned by Intuit would be enough motivation but apparently Quicken has not been owned by Intuit since 2016! I had the same reaction as I did when I discovered that RAM pickups are no longer owned by Dodge.
- rascul 4y ago
  > I discovered that RAM pickups are no longer owned by Dodge. That one got me awhile back. Ram was spun off in 2010, but they're both owned by Stellantis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_Trucks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_Trucks
- danachow 4y ago
  Dodge hasn’t been an independent entity since 1928 and Dodge and RAM are still part of Stellantis (the thing that Chrysler morphed into). RAM truck VINs still to this day use the same Dodge manufacturing code and RAM trucks supply chain didn’t change, so this just seems like an internal rebranding. It’s not like Mazda or Volvo with Ford or something.
UncleEntity 4y ago
> I'd love to, but I can't restart a 32-year quicken file, so they got me. GnuCash is open source and this is hacker news… They don’t have some sort of exportable file format that both quicken and gnucash can understand? Which, of course, doesn’t help with the UI issues.
- gotaquestion 4y ago
  You can export QXF and QMTF (and CSV) but the online QXF converters seem dubious... (not QFX, that's different). Although you have inspired me to spend some time examining the formats.

yeetsfromhellL2 4y ago

I'm surprised to see a GNU project that not only hosts their code on GitHub, but also has an official Facebook community. What gives?

cinntaile 4y ago
You probably need some pragmatism to stay relevant.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  I think that's why parent was surprised it was a GNU project.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
It doesn’t appear to be related to GNU Linux or other FSF related efforts. It just uses the license and the name.
- yeetsfromhellL2 4y ago
  https://www.gnu.org/software/software.html https://www.gnu.org/software/software.html It's a GNU project.
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    You’re right! Thanks

spicybright 4y ago

Obligatory HN comment about the mobile site being bad: It's almost impressive how bad it is on my phone. The content takes up 2/3 of the page horizontally to make room for the logo on the side. I get GNU and it's culture are less about mobile and more about *nixy desktops/laptops/servers, but it takes more effort to break things like this than letting the browser do it's natural thing most of the time.

massysett 4y ago
The website probably predates the mobile era and no one has bothered to rewrite it since.
- spicybright 4y ago
  Eh. It has viewport meta tags and the apple app icon markup. But you're probably still right, I'm sure at some point they just peppered those into all their pages to fix them at least a tiny bit.

nickjj 4y ago

I once wrote about using GnuCash as a freelance solo developer at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/using-gnucash-as-a-freelancer-to-track-finances-and-prepare-taxes https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/using-gnucash-as-a-freelancer.... I started using it in 2017 and still use it today. It's still really solid and makes filing quarterly taxes not too painful. In my opinion it's one of the best tools out there if you like your privacy and don't want to link your bank accounts to a third party service.

abawany 4y ago
Same here. Compared to the extractive noise of the intuit alternative, GnuCash just works to log transactions and generate statements necessary to file taxes and etc.
nickjj 4y ago
I didn't include this in my original reply but today is May 1st. Since GnuCash involves manually entering in transactions it's easy to think that'll take a ton of time. I just timed myself and it took 5 minutes to input everything for April 2022 into GnuCash. This includes all income and expenses (personal and business). I'm not even using GnuCash's automated feature for recurring payments too, so that 5 minutes includes manually inputting various subscription costs (I don't have a lot). This also includes a bunch of business related things (estimated tax information, a few income streams in their own "GnuCash Accounts" and a few expense streams in their own "GnuCash Accounts"). I do this by opening GnuCash and my bank's dashboard side by side and then running through last month's entries. Most banks support exporting CSVs and I'm 100% certain I could write a Python script to parse this and auto-import things into GnuCash but since the bank item descriptions for the same transactions change over time I don't want to risk it. The 1 hour per year of manually entering numbers (I copy paste the dollar amounts to reduce human error btw) gives me more confidence than writing that script. I also know to make that script robust enough to consider using it for real in a way that wouldn't require manually checking it would be quite involved. As soon as the script's results require manually checking it for accuracy then you might as well have input things manually without the script.
- 4y ago

dang 4y ago

Related: GnuCash 4.7 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28666104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28666104 - Sept 2021 (11 comments) Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23237445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23237445 - May 2020 (319 comments) GnuCash: Open-source double-entry accounting software - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20109545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20109545 - June 2019 (100 comments) Using GnuCash as a Freelancer to Track Finances and Prepare Taxes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16857884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16857884 - April 2018 (184 comments)

adictator 4y ago

How does this compare with Actual that was open sourced just a couple of days or so ago? I think it's easy to make anything better than the super buggy mint.com.

neilv 4y ago

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 each day. Eventually I kept simplifying, especially in Expense accounts, eventually only distinguishing transaction categories by tax implications. I also stopped recording each individual little cash transaction. Instead, I occasionally counted the cash in my wallet, and added an "Expenses:Misc." transaction to make it match what GnuCash thought (given ATM withdrawals the bank import showed). I never did figure out a practical way to track Guideline.com 401(k) in GnuCash, and, the instant I could close the account, I rolled it over to Fidelity. Where tracking the prices and every dividend reinvestment of my ITOT and AGG was easy and almost fun. I'm currently taking a break from GnuCash for 2022, seeing whether a fancy assets&liabilities spreadsheet in Libre Office would be better. (While still saving the monthly OFX/QFX exports from my financial accounts, while I can, in case I ever need them.) Initially, the spreadsheet seemed to do what I want with less effort, but I'm finding that GnuCash might actually be less effort in practice for the level of up-to-date and historical charting that I have.

yawaramin 4y ago
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.
- atmosx 4y ago
  How do you perform graph reporting and forecasting?
  - atgreen 4y ago
    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.

ericbarrett 4y ago

The GnuCash documentation is high quality and an excellent introduction to double entry accounting, with lots of great examples for e.g. stock sales.

johncs 4y ago

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 https://plaintextaccounting.com.

moistly 4y ago
Likewise, Beancount. https://beancount.github.io/ https://beancount.github.io/
- Tijdreiziger 4y ago
  The Fava front-end for Beancount is great: https://beancount.github.io/fava/ https://beancount.github.io/fava/
ninjin 4y ago
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 https://www.ledger-cli.org
- atgreen 4y ago
  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.

jen_h 4y ago

I've used GnuCash for 13 years now, for personal finances and two companies, and love it to death. There's something really satisfying when you see everything balance! The only issues I've had over all these years have been banks/credit cards that have weird idiosyncrasies in their file formats (lookin' at you, AmEx) that require you to remove the trailing white space (bad memory, I have a text file that reminds me what to do every time) or whatever and getting stock updates (gnc-fq-update) working again after upgrade. It's also really accessible. While slow and a little annoying, I can do almost everything with a keyboard instead of the mouse (unlike so much online tax software, which is a carpal tunnel specialist's dream).

solarengineer 4y ago
“tailing white space” - I wonder if a trim () on that input field would help.
- jen_h 4y ago
  I found my caveats file! It was actually an errant newline at the end of each file. Gnucash should've known enough to strip it. And the other thing was a file that used `--` for deposits, so I have a note to 's/--//g' those files. I think that's the kind of thing that some of us see as a neat challenge to figure out and overcome; but for others, it becomes a barrier for entry. I still evangelize the heck out of Gnucash, though. It's so powerful...and not Intuit.

viceroyalbean 4y ago

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 calculation

xupybd 4y ago
If you get out of sync just put in fake transactions to get it to balance and start again.
jldugger 4y ago
My workflow: 1. Lots of scheduled transactions. Rent, cable bill, paychecks, car insurance premiums, quarterly estimated tax payments, etc. Any transaction you can expect and guess at can be a scheduled transaction. This really cuts down on the catch-up work. 2. Transaction import. A lot of what's left after #1 is the random unpredictable expenses go on a credit card, and most of those support OFX or quicken format data downloads. As you import that data, it should be able to match up official records with what you had written down, and if different "update and record." 3. Monthly reconciliation. At the end of the month, review all the statements you get with your records using the reconcile window. If I'm lazy, I can skip liabilities and investments for a month as long as my main checking account is correct and CC payments for next month reflect their most recent billing statements.
kqr 4y ago
Do you really need full double-entry accounting for personal finances? This usually boils down to either - you need it for tax/legal/bureaucratic purposes, or - you are really short on money and you need to keep track of it down to the last cent. When either of those two conditions are true, double-entry is amazing. If the above are not true (and it sounds that way based on your comment) then I would do it statistically. Determine how much time you would like to spend recording transactions. Let's say it's 1/11 of the time it takes when you are doing a full accounting. (Eleven is good because it's prime, so it's less likely to accidentally line up with cyclic transactions.) Enter all expenses/incomes only every eleventh day. Nothing the other days. You have to be really strict about this! Instead of entering the actual number, though, multiply it by 11. Tadaa! After a while, you have practically the same result but at a fraction of the effort (roughly three times per month instead of 30.) Note that the number you get will have some sampling error. For bonus points, you can calculate the size of this. Depending on how large the variation of your expenses is and how often you enter them, it's not unreasonable to get a sampling error where three standard deviations are ±50 % -- are you okay with a rough estimation like that? If not, you have to sample more often. More technical note: what I've described is actually a stratified sampling scheme, only once you've sampled a day, you do a full accounting of the transactions within that day. Depending on the practical structure of your transactions, you might find that you can optimise your sampling scheme (lower sample error and/or less effort) by selecting more days, but only entering one transaction from each day. Read up on sampling! It's powerful!

manifoldgeo 4y ago

I'm an avid user of GnuCash. Last I checked, their mobile app was basically abandoned (around 2018), and it had no way to use a SQL DB, even though the desktop can use SQLite3, MySQL, and Postgres [1]. So there was no easy way to use desktop AND mobile in a shared way. So, I made a small companion app called gnucash-helper [2]. It's a Python/Flask web app for doing the very basics of GnuCash, i.e. entering transactions, looking at their history, and checking balances. If you want to try it out, there's a demo of it on https://demo.checkyour.finance https://demo.checkyour.finance. The container it runs in is destroyed every 30 minutes, but that's enough time to play with it. It's very simple, but it does everything I need, to the point that I no longer have to open the desktop program. Your feedback is most welcome. I should say right now, though: it's more like beta software at this point. I haven't built the Docker container in a while, so the one on Docker Hub may or may not work. If anyone has any interest in contributing ideas or code to this, I would love to hear about it. Edit: A couple things I forgot to mention: - The backend for this is a .gnucash file that is saved in the sqlite file format. You can add your own into an S3 bucket, and this will write to it using Python's boto3 library. - There's no way as of yet to download the GnuCash file directly from the web app, but I would like to add that in the future. - The heart of this app is the Piecash Python library [3]. It lets you use Python to alter GnuCash files. References: [1]: https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v4/C/gnucash-guide/basics-files1.html https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v4/C/gnucash-guide/basics-files... [2]: https://github.com/bxbrenden/GnuCash-Helper https://github.com/bxbrenden/GnuCash-Helper [3]: https://github.com/sdementen/piecash https://github.com/sdementen/piecash

ajvs 4y ago
Great to see this. I stopped using GnuCash completely once the Android app stopped getting updates, but if this web app works well it might get me back into it.
zikani_03 4y ago
Nice! I have been using GnuCash for about a year now; moved on from an Excel workbook that got annoying to maintain. Been thinking of an API/Web interface (or Telegram bot) to quickly save transactions - so it's wonderful to see you built something in that can help in that direction! Guess I can look at the telegram bot part now :)

kayson 4y ago

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 needed. I stopped using Mint after a brief stint because of data privacy and security. No matter how many security claims they made, I just couldn't justify giving them my bank passwords in plain text. I suppose it doesn't matter as much for credit cards, but for my checking/savings accounts, a compromise would actually jeopardize my money. Apparently some of the big US banks are starting to roll out authentication APIs (e.g OAUTH) so it may be worth another look. It does seem like there's still room for a FOSS/selfhosted Mint clone that gracefully and automatically handles data import (I wouldn't even mind having to enter my banking passwords each time I want to update, to avoid storing them)

kodah 4y ago
A Mint clone would require that banks facilitate much more open access. Being centralized is a good position for Mint because all the financial institution has to do is trust Intuit.
BeetleB 4y ago
I use KMyMoney which has probably the same "support" as GnuCash for online banking. I now just download transacations from the institution (CSV, OFX, etc) and import the file. Many institutions charge extra for being able to pull automatically, but their export is free. Sounds like a pain but it isn't that bad.
- brewdad 4y ago
  I've found that I appreciate the manual download and import process. It makes me look over each transaction more deliberately than I would if it were just an automated update. I've caught 3 or 4 fraudulent or erroneous charges over the past half decade because I'm forced to look at each charge on my credit cards. Probably 90-95% of my spending goes on a credit card and then gets paid off at the end of the month. GnuCash has been great for tracking everything. I'll have to look at KMyMoney too.

fires10 4y ago

I have tried GnuCash in the past. It was too complicated for my needs. All other budgeting software I thought was too complicated and complex for the average person. I use a spreadsheet to handle my budget. I keep it as a reminder that temporary solutions can become permanent. The file name is "planstemp". It was temporary more about ten years ago. I found using different banks depending on the purpose of the transaction the easiest way to keep track of expenses. I use one bank for regular monthly expenses and another for daily expenses. Regular expenses are predictable. If I was running a business, I keep that separate from personal.

ngcc_hk 4y ago

Sidetrack : Wonder can they do gnuCoin, openSourceCoin or even …

rushabh 4y ago

If you are looking for a modern free desktop accounting platform check out FrappeBooks - https://github.com/frappe/books https://github.com/frappe/books. Version 1.0 is round the corner.

atmosx 4y ago
Looks nice. Does this tool support multiple currencies?
- rushabh 4y ago
  Not yet, you can add your comments here! https://github.com/frappe/books/issues/183 https://github.com/frappe/books/issues/183
staindk 4y ago
This looks very neat, thanks for the link. Seems more targeted towards small businesses/freelancers... wonder if that would make it less ideal for use in a personal finance context. FWIW I'm happily using a service called 22seven[1] that is backed by a big bank in my country (South Africa). It is super convenient and links to a bunch of different services so you can pull in all your investments etc. to track all at once (of course this means they track you too, but they were doing that before anyhow)... I just don't know for how many years it will stay updated, free, and available for use to people who bank at other banks (such as myself), so I'd like to at least plan for moving to a more open alternative when the time comes. [1] https://www.22seven.com/ https://www.22seven.com/

justsomehnguy 4y ago

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 the time is a thing which drived me to totally abandon the thing.

KeepFlying 4y ago
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.
- iggldiggl 4y ago
  The workaround (or actually even the proper solution, as the money does need to be accounted for somewhere, doesn't it?) would be to have a "money in transit" account, wouldn't it? Though of course I guess it'd still be somewhat annoying having to manually split up transactions instead of things being handled automatically behind the scene with native support for that kind of thing.
- zburatorul 4y ago
  You should adopt a similar solution https://github.com/redstreet/beancount_reds_plugins/tree/main/beancount_reds_plugins/effective_date#readme https://github.com/redstreet/beancount_reds_plugins/tree/mai...

2143 4y ago

I'm aware of the benefits of double entry bookkeeping, and tried to use GNUCash for a while. The fact that it doesn't have an official companion smartphone app (that I'm aware of) was the dealbreaker; I can go for weeks without touching my personal computer. Ultimately I've resorted to Google Sheets with a lot of formulae and data validation; I can now see all my incomes and expenses, the summary of all my accounts, expenses across different categories etc. I've been on this for a while now and it's been great. And Google Sheets sync to my smartphone as well. (I periodically manually backup all the important stuff separately, just in case Google blocks me). Also I'm not a huge fan of the UI. Still, I would've used GNUCash if I used my personal computer regularly.

cja 4y ago

UI text is painfully small and while keyboard-friendly it has too many annoyances

holtwick 4y ago

Receipts - for macOS, local database, automated content recognition, document management. Convenient commercial alternative to GnuCash to track expenses and income. https://www.receipts-app.com/ https://www.receipts-app.com/

petesergeant 4y ago

I switched a while ago to MoneyDance which is a very similar paid app. It’s OK. I have a lot of Perl code sitting about for unfucking various bank transaction exports into OFX, and I wonder how people who aren’t programmers manage

Tijdreiziger 4y ago

How does this compare against Beancount + Fava?

yrro 4y ago

I was an avoid GnuCash user until HSBC (my bank) stopped offering statement downloads in OFX format. I took a glimpse into the chasm of madness of trying to OCR their PDF statements and decided... no.