New user transitioning from Quicken

Sun May 1 14:33:52 EDT 2016

Thanks Colin and Maf, I was just being really braindead.     Once I located
the accounts corresponding to my check register, some of the information
did show up.     I do still see one critical and one minor obstacle to
transitioning.     I imagine *every* serious Quicken user would have the
same issues, but there's suprisingly little web discussion of these.

            1)  critical issue: quicken tags
                       There was a some discussion about these on the web
round 2011, and at the time the gnucash development team said that they
weren't going to implement filtering/sorting by tags in the near future.
 Then the discussion seemed to have died.     Have there been new
developments on this topic?    I've been unable to find anything recent on
this topic, and searching the gnucash-help and gnucash-guide for tag brings
up nothing.    I certainly can't do without this functionality.   I've read
very old posts about workarounds, like sorting by customers/jobs/etc.
I'd be happy to convert each of my quicken tags to a customer or job tag if
that's the best work-around solution.     The easiest way to implement the
work-around would be to make these changes at the time that I import
transactions from my QIF file.     Specifically, my typical QIF category
entry line looks like
      LGross Receipts:Desk take/CY01
where CY01 is the tag.     It would be easy to edit the QIF file and change
all CY01s to a customer or Job identifier.
But I've been unable to find instructions about this on web.    If I can't
make this change in the QIF file, is there a way to access the tag
information and batch-convert it once I'm in gnucash?

             2) Minor issue:  memo fields.     I can see these if I choose
the Double line option from the View menu, but it would be *so, so* much
better if they were visible within a single line format.   Since 80% of my
single lines are blank space, there's plenty of room.  Are there plans to
add this functionality?

Thanks again for your help and patience

On Sun, May 1, 2016 at 2:47 AM, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 1 May 2016 at 06:53, Leo Simon <leosimon at berkeley.edu> wrote:
> > Hi everybody.
> >
> > Like many users of gnucash, I've been using Linux for years and the only
> > reason I keep a windows virtualbox is to have access to quicken.     I
> have
> > very much hoped that gnucash would allow me to jettison Windows forever,
> but
> > so far it appears that's sadly not to be an attainable goal.
> >
> > I've read the section of the manual for transitioning-from-Quicken users
> > like me, but amazingly it doesn't address the most basic questions that
> all
> > quicken users must surely want an answer to.    The first of these is:
> how
> > to/if it's indeed possible to  reproduce the analog of Quicken's check
> > registers.       The manual has an entire chapter devoted to the
> transition
> > process, but amazingly---and this seems to be a pattern---it doesn't
> appear
> > to anywhere address the simplest of simple questions:   can I get the
> same
> > functionality out of gnucash that I get out of Quicken?
> >
> > The manual seems to suggest that working with Accounts rather than
> > Categories will make your life easier, whereas it's abundantly clear
> that,
> > at least for long-time quicken-users,  it makes your life *much* harder.
>
> Just think of categories as being the same as expense accounts.  When
> you enter a transaction to pay for something from your bank account
> (for example), you just open your bank account to add the transaction
> but instead of selecting a category (as in quicken) you select an
> equivalent expense account.  So I don't see where it is that much
> different.  Perhaps you can explain what it is that is making it
> harder for you.
>
> > Specifically, the first thing that I want to be able to do is abstract
> from
> > gnucash's account structure and look at all my transactions in a ledger
> that
> > matches my online ledger with my bank.    In other words, I've been
> unable
> > to get "outside" of gnucash's account structure, and see a date-sorted
> list
> > of *all* my transactions, rather than see, individually, all of by
> > transactions that belong to a particular Account.
>
> I can't help thinking you (or I) am missing something here.  If you
> open the register for you bank account is that not the same as the
> online ledger with your bank?
>
> >      To say it in yet a
> > different way, I simply want to see a replica of my bank statement within
> > gnucash.     Presumably, *everybody* who has ever used Quicken must
> > desparately want to see the same thing, so it *presumably* must be
> possible.
>
> As I said, is that not just the register view of your bank account?
>
> Colin
>

-- 
_____________________________________________________________________

Professor Leo Simon                    leosimon at Berkeley.EDU
Agricultural and Resource Economics    http://are.berkeley.edu/~simon
207 Giannini Hall #3310                (510) 917-2916  (cell)
University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley CA 94720-3310                 (510) 643-8911  (fax)

~