Accounts payable -- overly cumbersome?

[Tommy Kelly]

I'm new to GnuCash, my previous experience being with, among others,
Quickbooks. I'm on a Mac running SnowLeopard. GC version is 2.2.9
I'm trying out GC partly because it's open source, and partly because
QB on the Mac doesn't have multi-currency support.

However, I'm finding the accounts payable mechanisms fairly
cumbersome. My initial experience was that it consisted of the
following items:

1. Click Business->Vendor->New Bill. Fair enough.

Then, in the resulting "New Bill" dialog box:

2. Click on "Select..." next to the "Vendor" field. Why can't I type
in that field? It would be nice if it would search on typed strings
and offer completions

Then, in the resulting "Find Vendor" dialog box:

3. Enter a search string in the search criteria. Then hit "Find" or
"Enter". Note that if I make a mistake in entering my search string
and want to re-enter, I have to click the big plus sign to get the
search criteria line back. If instead I hit "Cancel", I get kicked
back out to the "New Bill" dialog

Then (assuming I found the vendor) back in the "New Bill" box:

4. Hit "OK" after entering any relevant data

But then I get to an "Edit Bill" tab where:

5. I enter the details

And finally:

6. I hit "Post" to get the thing into a/p

I guess all of that may be the newbie route and I have yet to discover
the faster ninja-user method. But it's much more time consuming than
what something like QuickBooks provides. The main advantage QB has is
that normal usage allows you to enter a bill in a single screen.
GnuCash forces five screens on you: New Bill, Find Vendor, New Bill
again, Edit Bill, Post Bill.

Within QB's one screen it will try to autocomplete the vendor, and the
a/p account. And you put all data into it in one go, so when you hit
"Save" you're done. That means the bill is created and posted. There
may be a way to enter and not "post", but I've never used that (nor
found a need for it).

Also, if I subsequently want to edit a bill in QB, I just do it. I may
get some warnings. I could also lock things so editing is not allowed,
at least not without a password. But there's no concept of "unposting"
as their is in GC.

Is this critique useful to anyone in development? I'll likely spot
more like it if I persist in using GC. Unfortunately I cannot offer to
help on coding, but maybe it helps to have these user-side things
pointed out? Or I can mind my own business and stop mentioning it :-)

thanks,
Tommy