[H-GEN] Is GnuCash ready for prime-time? Was: RFC: SCO

ben.carlyle at invensys.com ben.carlyle at invensys.com
Tue Jun 17 04:06:06 EDT 2003


[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
[ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]

Hello, 





Sarah Walters <sarah at uow.edu.au>
Sent by: Majordomo <majordom at caliburn.humbug.org.au>
17/06/03 16:35
Please respond to general

 
        To:     Humbug General <general at lists.humbug.org.au>
        cc: 
        Subject:        Re: [H-GEN] RFC: SCO

>                               We also use MS Money to track our
> accounts, and require its full functionality. Last time I checked,
> GNUCash wasn't there yet. Is it time for another look anyone?

I've just been trying gnucash over the last few weeks as recent posts on 
this list seemed to indicate that members were either using it or at least 
familiar with it. I run a Quicken accounting system for my personal 
finances at home, and my experiment was basically to import my Quicken 
data files and try to run the two systems in parallel for a while[1].

My experimental hardware was a P133 laptop with moderate ram and disk 
capacity running a Debian linux distribution, and gnucash was installed 
using the debian packages. I had lots of little niggles as the import 
process was much more painful than it needed to be, but they were one-off 
so it didn't really matter to me. My main recommendations from this 
experience are to create your account layout -first-, then try to import 
over the top of it. You get a much better feel for how things should go 
and you also get the chance to set your default currancy away from US$ 
before it does too much damage ;)

I like the general layout of the accounts. Expense and Income categories 
as accounts are a good use of the system, and it that part works very 
nicely. Opening balances are extracted from Equity accounts, which I 
like[2]. I like the way they've constructed the data model for shares and 
equities. You create an account to house all of your individual 
share-holdings and have a sub-account per share type. Buying and selling 
your shares works in the same way as exchange rates for currencies.

The reports and graphs seem mostly reasonable. They seem to work 
correctly, and a reasonable variety of reports and graphs are available by 
default. You can double-click on the various graph legend boxes to get 
more detailed graphs or to be transferred to the register view for the 
appropriate account.

All of this works well.

I have some complaints, though, and regular lockups are one of them. On 
several occasions now I've had gnucash fall into a sleep that it never 
wakes from (it's not using an CPU). This is more of a problem than for 
Quicken (which does much the same) because GnuCash saves changes only when 
you press the "Save" button, not when you finish editing a transaction. 
This appears to be a concession to the UML file format which would make it 
quite difficult to chop and change pieces of data mid-way through a file 
without causing major disruption. I think this is the wrong approach. 
We're dealing with finances here, and the Load/Save concept is really an 
idea which should not have been extended into this problem domain. The UML 
saving is quite slow for me, however I'm using quite an antiquated 
machine.

GnuCash is also impossible to use at a resolution of 800x600. 1024x768 is 
required if you want to be able to use various fields which are squished 
out of existance at lower resolutions. I had to switch to an external 
monitor for my laptop to get at many of the useful functions.

One useful function is tax setup. I'm sure this can be modified, but the 
default installation appears to only support the US tax system. I didn't 
find anywhere in the GUI where I could setup accounts to relate to 
specific TaxPack questions, for example.

Another useful function is loan setup. I have an investment loan with a 
fixed payment amount of $1000 per month. I believe it's possible to fiddle 
around with the formulas to calculate how much of this amount is capital 
and how much is interest but there doesn't appear to be any way to set it 
up without heavy use of the manual[3]. The loan wizard didn't have any 
option to setup anything but the most basic kind of loan. The formulas 
themselves on cursory inspection also seem to be using the wrong 
philosophy. Each formaula appear to be based on "i" which is the number of 
the transaction, instead of being based on the current account's balance 
at the time the scheduled transaction occured.

I noticed little things, like the fact that when you create a scheduled 
transaction from a register transaction and change the date that it 
highlights days on the calender which are one less than tha actual dates 
transactions will take effect on ;) The main thing, though is the fact 
that when it crashes it takes any unsaved data with it. All the other 
problems make me want to contribute to fix them, but that one is the one 
that makes me not want to use it at all.

IMHO It's not quite ready for prime time and I don't think it'll get there 
unless someone fixes this file saving paradigm. Real software crashes 
occasionally, and there must be a mechanism to make sure it doesn't take 
your finances with it :)

Does anyone else have any solutions/corrections/comments?

Benjamin.

[1] I'm trying to move away from Windows as the main PC in the house, also 
:)
[2] My version of quicken likes to record an opening balance as a transfer 
from the account which is being opened... :)
[3] The manual actually doesn't have enough detail to do any of this. It's 
got some basic tutorials, but doesn't yet cover the complete 
fucntionality.



--
* This is list (humbug) general handled by majordomo at lists.humbug.org.au .
* Postings to this list are only accepted from subscribed addresses of
* lists 'general' or 'general-post'.  See http://www.humbug.org.au/



More information about the General mailing list