Giving up on Gnucash

Thu Apr 21 22:28:37 EDT 2005

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to read the replies...

Alex Kohl wrote:
> I am sorry to say that after struggling with Gnucash
> 1.8. for several weeks that I am going to have to
> switch back to Quickbooks.

Having just made the switch from QB myself at the turn of the year, I 
have to agree that its not easy. I personally find it rewarding though 
to watch the process of development and to participate in whatever small 
way I can through this list or posting bugs or whatever. One thing to 
keep in mind, and I hope that this will keep you from being too sour on 
the whole thing. THat is, GnuCash is "in development" whereas Quickbooks 
is not. Quickbooks has been a mature accounting package for years and 
the updates and revisions that come out now are merely fluff. GNuCash is 
still implementing large parts of its feature set and still dealing with 
a heavy amount of bugs. I expect, given a few more years, that GnuCash 
development will reach a level where its basically "done" and all those 
things you were expecting and looking for will be there.

> 
> I'd like to tell people why I am making this change so
> that people know why this application is not as
> popular as it could be. To those who tell me to "send
> patches" I am just a man trying to run a business and
> do not have time to start hacking inside my accounting
> software. If that is what it takes to get things
> working I'll just take out my credit card and buy a
> program that does what I need today.

I personally think that the hacking is not required. Obviously different 
businesses have different requirements and perhaps your negative 
experience as opposed to my positive one is a by-product of this. I 
encourage you, if gnucash is not working for you, to try some of the 
other open-source account programs out there like SQL-Ledger. It may 
suit your needs better, and though I've not used it, I believe it may be 
farther along in its development cycle.

You are right, you can plunk down that plastic and buy a finished 
product or you can participate in the development of a new product. 
That's the great thing about free software -- you have made a stab at 
it, found that it wasn't for you and all its cost you is some time and 
maybe a little frustration. Its a sad reality that the opposite case 
does not exist. If you had tried QB and decided you didn't like it, 
you'd be out the money as well as the time and frustration.

> 
> I really liked the idea of a non-commercial finance
> program. I knew that Gnucash would not try to display
> ads, secretly collect my private data or otherwise do
> things that were not in my interest. What I had not
> anticipated was that Gnucash would lack the most basic
> user interface functionality or that its developers
> would be completely engrossed in features that they
> considered interesting while ignorning real world
> concerns.
> 

I don't think the developers are ignoring real world concerns, but are 
just focusing on different aspects of the project right now, such as the 
gnome2 port. It seems this is an all important change for the project 
and is, I'm guessing, consuming large amounts of developer time (donated 
  time!). There are a number of things I've seen discussed on this list 
that have been put in the "waiting for gnome2" category... That doesn't 
mean they are ignoring the real world concerns, just putting them on the 
back burner while some important back-end work gets done.

I think you are on the right track in recognising the need for 
non-commercial accounting software. It is critical. It is why I switched 
away from QB. I got tired of forced updates to continue using features 
that were losing support in older versions. I got tired of finding 
calculation errors in the payroll software and having no-one to complain 
to. I definitely had concerns about my security and my privacy -- QB 
likes to call home a lot and that just concerns me. Further, in making 
the transistion from QB I discovered that I couldn't export my old QB 
transactions anymore -- a feature that got dumped by Inuit some time 
when I wasn't looking. That made me even happier about my decision to 
change. Intuit was holding my financial data hostage and I had to 
manually recreate large portions of my books. Anyway, I hope that you 
won't lose that desire for a better model in accounting software.

> Perhaps a concrete example would help. Let us look at
> "Bug 144383: font size?" which has been open in NEW
> status since 2004-06-15. I can barely read the text in
> GnuCash on my 17 inch monitor. One would think that
> there would be some sort of option to control the size
> of the font. I would personally think that this would
> be present in version 1.0. But apparently this is not
> as high a priority as OFX Direct Connect or embedding
> Scheme scripts inside of GnuCash. Not all of us have
> 21 inch monitors or 21 year old eyes. If I can't read
> my reports they aren't of much use.
> 
> Another problem is that in the Accounts Payable
> register the vendor column takes up an enormous amount
> of space and can't be resized (except to make it
> larger.) I can't read the Transfer column or (horror!)
> the Debit column. How am I supposed to get anything
> done if I can't figure out how much money is moving
> around? Every time I try to resize the vendor column
> it just bounces back.
> 
> I wish I could believe that GnuCash were ready for
> public consumption but I would just be fooling myself.
> Until GnuCash, and free software in general, decides
> to tackle those issues that are important to those who
> use the software as opposed to those who enjoy writing
> it Microsoft, Intuit and other for-profit writers of
> proprietary software will continue to dominate.

I don't think it is fair to attack free software in general. There are 
tons of free software projects out there that are vastly superior to 
commercial software in a variety of aspects. As I said above, Gnucash is 
in heavy development and is getting better all the time. I personally am 
grateful to the developers for their efforts. It is unfortunate that it 
didn't work out for you. I hope you'll keep an open mind and try it 
again in the future.

Regards,

Andrew
> 
> Alex
> 
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