[HN Gopher] GnuCash 5.9 Released
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GnuCash 5.9 Released
Author : moasda
Score : 127 points
Date : 2024-09-30 17:26 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gnucash.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gnucash.org)
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| GnuCash is solid. One thing that I love: I have full control over
| my data, and its stored as a simple xml (also supports SQLite,
| but why use more complex when simpler works just as well?)
|
| I have a few (comparatively minor) complaints about GnuCash, but
| they're around UI. Things like: it would be nice to assign all
| matching (eg Regen) transactions to a selected account, and stuff
| like that.
|
| But overall, having something that is A) simple and B) I control
| fully, beats everything else.
|
| The principles of free software show, I guess.
| equivocates wrote:
| I would argue xml is more complex, but to each his own. :)
| trollied wrote:
| XML is not simpler. You can just query a SQLite db with SQL.
|
| What a weird take.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| It is not weird at all if you think of it from an
| implementation perspective: it is _much_ easier and simpler
| to write an XML parser than it is to write a loader for
| SQLite databases, even if you do not write an SQL parser for
| it.
|
| After all there are way more independent XML parsers
| implemented in a variety of programming languages than there
| are SQLite implementations :-P.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| How is SQLite DB simpler than a human readable markup
| language?!
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I agree with bdjsiqoocwk that XML is way simpler than SQLite.
| In the case where I'm making changes by hand, it's _much_
| easier to open an XML file in a text editor and edit it, than
| it is to figure out an SQL query to do the same thing. In the
| case where I 'm making changes programmatically, libraries
| will handle the complexity of XML for me, but I will _still_
| have to struggle through figuring out an SQL query if I 'm
| trying to connect to SQLite.
|
| SQLite is easier if you're comfortable with SQL to the extent
| that it's little to no effort for you to write queries. But
| most people aren't that comfortable, and XML offers them
| significant advantages. I certainly prefer XML at any rate.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| Suppose you don't have SQLite, how do you open a SQLite
| database? The only way is you have to re-implement SQLite
| from scratch. Good luck with that.
|
| Now imagine you don't have vim, how do you open an XML file?
| You can use any of other thousands of text editors out there,
| or any of tens of libs in tens of different languages.
|
| I think your take that sqlite is simpler than a text file is
| the weird one.
| mszcz wrote:
| I tried it years ago but finally settled on HLedger. Like
| GnuCash, I own and control my data, but with HLedger I have an
| ability to go in and correct or change something (and not in a
| "accounting-appropriate" way) in bulk just by editing it in
| Sublime Text. Then again, my use case is pretty basic and not
| mission critical so YMMV.
| gavinhoward wrote:
| This is absolutely a valid reason to not use GnuCash.
|
| As for myself, I agree that the XML format is not great, but I
| use the SQLite format, which allows me to write scripts on it.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| You can write scripts to transform XML documents as well.
| gavinhoward wrote:
| True, but I don't want to. And that is the biggest barrier
| of all.
| jcarrano wrote:
| I'm using GnuCash and not being able to easily do bulk changes
| or easily script it is quite annoying, for example after a
| slight mistake in a CSV import.
| mszcz wrote:
| Exactly. I can try out stupid stuff, but because it's all
| text files and no magic, reverting back is as easy as it
| gets.
| bulletmarker wrote:
| And since the CSV importer is terrible there are always a lot
| of edits to do unfortunately.
| samus wrote:
| GnuCash has a scripting engine. If you have to do a specific
| correction very often, it might be worth it to implement
| something. If possible, the CSV should be preprocessed of
| course.
|
| If nothing else works, a Gnucash file is XML. A bit annoying
| to work with, but quite possible.
| jrootabega wrote:
| Can you share a link to the docs for the scripting engine?
| I've seen conflicting information over the years and I'm
| not sure what the latest really is.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Does this help? https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/tree/s
| table/bindings/pyth...
| somat wrote:
| It's xml right.
|
| Whenever I have to edit an xml file I tend to just go ham with
| python's xml library. the scripts are never pretty, mainly
| because they are whatever addhoc editing I wanted in written
| form. The hardest part is figuring out the xpath syntax.
|
| A slight lie, I use lxml, mainly because it can select siblings
| which the built in xml lib is unable to do. but I still use the
| internal libs documentation, mainly because it is easier to
| read.
| mszcz wrote:
| Yeah, I've never found XML to be easy to edit/bulk edit/edit
| by hand. I suppose there are tools that would allow me to do
| that but since I would use them sporadically, I'd need to re-
| learn them every use. At the same ^D/^KD in Sublime works
| just fine.
| lhamil64 wrote:
| I use Firefly III (https://firefly-iii.org). It's a self-hosted
| web app which is nice for me because I tend to use it from my
| phone most of the time. It does have a pretty extensive API,
| perhaps not as easy to do bulk edits as a text file, but should
| be fairly straightforward. It also has a rule system that could
| be used to do bulk edits too.
| Okx wrote:
| GnuCash and KDE Money always seemed very similar to me. Why
| should I use GnuCash over KDE money?
| Andrex wrote:
| First thing to come to mind is if Gnome's your DE and you
| prefer more-native-feeling apps.
|
| Vice-versa if you're using KDE instead.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Getting OT here, but I've tended to prefer Gnome apps with a
| KDE desktop. The latest UI pessimizations in Gnome may having
| me switch completely away from Gnome, with the "You must
| click on sub menus to open them" being the final straw.
| GlibMonkeyDeath wrote:
| I looked carefully at GnuCash before settling on Beancount (or
| plain-text accounting in general) for personal finance software.
|
| The deal breaker for me was the underlying XML or SQLite formats
| of GnuCash. These are not terribly amenable to scripting, either
| for ingesting raw data or reporting. Whereas this is basically
| the point of plain-text tools like Beancount or HLedger. GnuCash
| feels too much like a walled-garden compared to plain-text tools.
|
| The plain-text format requires more work at first, but after you
| get the hang of it (and provided you have some background in
| scripting software) it is awesome.
| massysett wrote:
| To each their own I guess: my experience is the exact opposite.
| Plain text looks simple to human eyes but parsing it in a
| structured way is a nightmare and scripting edits to plain text
| is a mess.
|
| Databases on the other hand are built for this. After years of
| dissatisfaction with plain text accounting and many hours spent
| trying to improve it, I now use SQLite and it has been an
| enormous improvement.
| GlibMonkeyDeath wrote:
| I agree with using the tool that works best for your purpose.
|
| For me, I found that the SQLite models of GnuCash aren't
| straightforward to query. That's why Beancount created its
| own query language. Martin Blais has a good discussion of why
| a traditional database doesn't quite fit for many accounting
| purposes https://beancount.github.io/docs/beancount_query_lan
| guage.ht...
| garupoliq wrote:
| I tried to get into it several times but eventually came to the
| conclusion that it is, despite the unassuming name and the
| advertisement as a tool for personal finances probably more
| targeted at professional accountants or people who have some
| training in accounting, rather than just being a tool for
| tracking private finances in an intuitive way.
| blacklion wrote:
| I've tried many personal accounting software and all of them (but
| old Pcoket Money for PalmOS!) are very unhelpful in filling in
| expenses.
|
| If you need to record whole shop visit as one transaction (like
| "Food at Lidl") it is tolerable, but as soon as you want to enter
| each line in your receipt as separate part of split transaction
| (like, food:milk = 2 euro, food:bread = 1 euro, food:eggs = 3
| euro, food:meat:pork = 8 euro, etc) you need to type everything
| again and again without good suggestions, based on your previous
| history. Such suggestions could be very sophisticated, taking
| counterpart and other parameters and suggest "food:bread" and
| price by letters "br" if counterpart is "Lidl" or "clothing:bra"
| and other price if counterpart is "Victoria Secret", for example,
| but, alas, nothing I've tried, support this.
|
| Really, old (PalmOS 3.0!) Pocket Money was a breeze, and
| everything else, Desktop or Mobile, is much, much worse in this
| aspect.
|
| Also, I think, that when you have all you transactions vrty
| detailed, it is better to have nested "categories" and not nested
| "accounts". It is almost cosmetic difference, but it is strange
| for me to have "cache" and "food:meat:pork" as same type of
| objects. I don't transfer money to "food:meat:pork", I spend
| money for it. I transfer money to the shop, not to the product!
| As far as I know, professional accounting systems doesn't have
| account for each asset of the firm, like different accounts for
| monitors, laptops, computers and (computer) mices.
|
| Maybe, I don't find it yet? Any suggestions?
| stouset wrote:
| Is it actually all that useful to you to track each receipt
| line-item? For a few specific types of purchases, maybe, but
| I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest you might be
| taking on needless work that doesn't create value for you
| anywhere near that level of effort.
| cromka wrote:
| I'm with you on that one. Been tracking my personal finances
| since 2011 and I have yet found a need to go deeper with
| analysis. Although I can imagine it could be interesting to
| go extra deep, e.g. to observe changes in my nutritional
| habits based on my grocery receipts juxtaposed with, say, my
| bloodwork. But even then it'd be a gimmick as I could not
| potentially rely on any correlation noticed. I'm sure someone
| could come up with a better example.
|
| In any case, unless tracking gets super easy, with digital
| receipts saved directly onto our mobile devices and
| standardized for processing, I just couldn't be bothered to
| break down paper receipts.
|
| That BTW makes me wonder why have we not seen e-receipts
| standardized yet. We can pay wirelessly with devices, so why
| not save some more meta data about the transaction, including
| the receipt itself? Seems like a low hanging fruit, also
| saving tons of paper.
| RussianCow wrote:
| I did this exercise for a little over a year to understand my
| expenses in detail. Like the OP, I found it really
| frustrating to do with any bookkeeping software I tried, to
| the point where I eventually gave up as I didn't think it was
| worth the effort. I started writing a web app to make this
| easier but just didn't have the motivation to finish.
|
| With that said, I learned quite a bit as a result of that
| level of granularity. When all expenses at Amazon, Walmart,
| etc go into the same bucket, it's really difficult to truly
| understand what you're spending your money on and if you have
| a problem you need to curb. Seeing "$X in spending at Amazon"
| isn't really that useful without knowing how important or
| frivolous any of those expenses were.
| ipaddr wrote:
| At the grocery store it would be extremely useful to
| understand where money is going related to other food groups
| (diary is 10% more). At the garage or clothing store not very
| useful because the entire purchase is a good group but how
| much you are paying for meat could help you decide to buy it
| elsewhere but allow you to keep buying bread.
| xupybd wrote:
| Just tracking no but allocating yes.
|
| If you plan ahead you know how much money you actually have
| and can plan better.
|
| I find I save way more with a proper budget in place.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| You're basically describing envelope budgeting, I think, where
| the money is (like checking) or isn't (like credit cards)
| doesn't matter. You have money inside of physical or virtual
| "envelopes" that represent what money you really have available
| for X or Y. It's kind of like an abstraction on top of all your
| money sources.
| dagurp wrote:
| For this I recommend https://actualbudget.com/ . It is in
| many ways like You Need A Budget but you can host it yourself
| for free.
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| Envelope budgeting works really well, tbh. Especially for
| saving.
|
| Due to a colossal screw up my bank had after I moved back to
| my home country, it took me several months to get a new debit
| card. So I got used to just taking out X cash per month, and
| dividing it.
|
| I've tried a few financial tracking things since getting back
| on the card wagon, and found none of them actually have the
| same result (spending less) as just dividing cash into
| physical buckets.
| berkut wrote:
| I've tried a lot in the past as well, and after getting annoyed
| with proprietary OS X software (iBank in particular) back in
| 2009 or so, and not really liking GNUCash and KDEMoney (at
| least back in 2009) ended up writing my own open source simple
| app (native Cocoa, with a more recent Qt port for Linux) that
| I've been using every since on a daily basis.
|
| In terms of the detail, I used to do very detailed breakdowns
| of categories, but now I don't really see the point: my app
| supports 'split transactions' (one of the reasons I actually
| made it, as existing solutions had poor support for them back
| in 2009), and I generally just use things like 'Food',
| 'Drinks', 'Essentials' as categories, as it never really made
| sense (at least for me) to detail them with such accuracy.
|
| But for things like 'coffee', I do 'Drinks:Coffee', so I can
| see how much I am spending on fairly specific things, but I
| guess it's a balance in terms of whether it's worth the effort
| to record them so accurately compared to making use of the
| details.
|
| Similarly, things like 'Car:Fuel', 'Car:Service', etc...
| tunesmith wrote:
| At some point I really should do a first principles analysis
| of why I track money... as far as I know, it mostly comes
| down to: 1. is fraud happening? and 2. Am I saving enough for
| retirement? Oh, and I guess 3. taxes
|
| For fraud, I think it's basically a matter of whether we can
| recognize each transaction. You don't actually need to
| download transactions for that; you can just skim your
| monthly statements.
|
| For saving, that's tricky because there needs to be that
| recognition of what categories are likely to increase during
| retirement versus decrease. I gave that a single pass a while
| back, and now I have a count each month of those expense
| categories that will continue into retirement, along with a
| 12-month average, so I can get a sense of what my portfolio
| needs to be able to fund after I retire. For that, even
| though I have Banktivity, I also have to use a spreadsheet.
|
| For taxes, I don't know if anything really makes that easy.
| It's hard to know what category breakdown you really need to
| know whether you're capturing all your tax benefit, and my
| financial software doesn't tell me "oh, by the way, you'll
| want to split that transaction since some of it has a tax
| benefit."
| codedokode wrote:
| It would be better if the software could just scan the receipt.
| And if you live in the country with electronic receipts (like
| Russia) then you can get them to your email in electronic form
| or find online by identifiers on a paper receipt.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| May I ask why you want this? Does it have an actual purpose or
| do you just enjoy processing data? If the purpose is "check
| what % I'm spending in each category", you don't need account
| software for this. You just need a table with 2 columns, price
| and category and group by and sum. How you get that table has
| nothing to do with accounting.
| dmwilcox wrote:
| Ran a business with it, payroll, administered the 401k accounts,
| etc. Solid. Expense tracking good enough for a business with
| limited expenses, or background as a bookkeeper (my teenage job).
| But being able to generate balance sheet and profit&loss reports
| for my accountant, golden.
| _benj wrote:
| I tried some time ago GnuCash after getting tired of plain text
| accounting.
|
| I'm not sure what it was but I couldn't get it working for me.
| Tried HomeBank afterwards and was blown away by how accessible it
| is in comparison.
|
| I might give another try at GnuCash to track something like
| business/project expenses but it was rather hard to use for my
| personal finances.
| misnome wrote:
| I don't like the GNUcash model very much, it is a bit fiddly to
| use, and is pretty hard to get the right stats I want out of it.
| I've used and settled on several other packages in the past.
|
| But GNUCash existed when I first got a job decades ago.
|
| GNUCash exists today.
|
| I don't think any other package really matches the endurance.
| DaoVeles wrote:
| It is charming in that it has that mid 90s utility design.
|
| It is absolutely frustrating because it has that mid 90s
| utility design.
|
| I don't think I have seen any other utility hasnt really
| progressed on interface design like GNUcash. Like they built a
| prototype went "Nailed it!" And then moved onto back end stuff
| while ignoring all input from users.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| I've still yet to find anything that matched the usefulness and
| straightforwardness of Microsoft Money.
| DaoVeles wrote:
| This is the only reason I have any experience with these apps.
| When MS sunset Money and compatibility started to get wonky, my
| in-laws were at a loss at what to do. We never did find an
| alternative. They do however have a seperate Win 7 PC just for
| Money, which at there age isnt a huge problem but for others
| that is not viable long term.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Why not just setup a VM for Money specifically?
| gavindean90 wrote:
| Because they had a spare M.
| rnadomvirlabe wrote:
| I used GnuCash for a while, but I ended up spending too much time
| making the online sync settings work. For accounts where I had to
| manually download and import, I would end up putting off
| importing them due to the friction. I now pay for Quicken Classic
| and it's some of the best money I spend each year. The online
| account connections consistently work as expected, and it gets
| the job done for much less of a headache overall.
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| For personal accounting, MoneyManagerEx has a much simpler UI
| than GnuCash.
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