Accountant's comments on GNUcash

[Cam Ellison]

John M Collins wrote:
> Here is what my accountant says about GNUcash - would anyone like to
> comment?
>
>
>   
>> After several days of pulling my hair out I have managed to get the 
>> trial balance to balance.
>>
>> The reporting in Gnu is very poor.  I have had to run a general
>> ledger 
>> report on screen, cut and paste this to Excel and then work on the
>> data 
>> from there.  On the general ledger report in many accounts the
>> credits 
>> are randomly reported in the debit column (see accounts for VAT
>> outputs 
>> or credit card) and so I have had to go through and pull them into
>> the 
>> right column.
>>
>> However the main thing is that it still cannot cope with foreign 
>> currency.  In particular when amounts are transferred from Ruesch to 
>> HSBC current, the credit in Ruesch does not equal the debit in
>> current 
>> account (see MEI on 24/11/08 - it has debit 6,413.16 and credit 
>> 6,823.24).  To identify this I have needed to go through the whole 
>> ledger and literally match each debit to a credit.  It is just
>> fortunate 
>> that there are not that many foreign transactions - otherwise it
>> would 
>> be completely unmanageable.
>>
>> Executive summary: you urgently need to ditch this software and get 
>> something that works.
>>     
I have had one accountant complain about it, out of 3.  My current 
accountant (very experienced) has no problems at all, nor do any of the 
people, accountants and bookkeepers, who work for him.  Mind you, I 
export the reports, then import them into OpenOffice and convert them to 
Excel spreadsheets.  That makes a difference, because I can then clean 
out the non-essentials, and everything is lined up.  You'd make your 
accountant much happier if you did that.  If you're working with 
Windows, there should be a feature in MS Office to import HTML into a 
spreadsheet.

The foreign currency issue is out of my experience.  I buy instruments 
(I'm a psychologists) from the US, but with a credit card, and the 
amounts are always converted.  You may want to dispense with multiple 
currencies and convert the amounts as of the day of purchase or sale: my 
reading of this list suggests that working with multiple currencies 
requires a deft touch.

Other than that, I'd tell him to sod off: the one accountant who 
complained to me is an accountant by virtue of a few courses and 
experience - he does not have a designation, and he is not accustomed to 
working with commercial enterprises.  The words he left off his last 
statement are "for me".

Cheers

Cam