Comments on GnuCash project goals

[Patrick Caldon]

"Stanley A. Klein" wrote:

> 1.   GnuCash needs the ability to import Quick Books files.  They are in
> "QBW" format.
> 
> 2.   An important feature is the ability to tag income and expense accounts
> with the tax line item under which they are to be accumulated in a tax
> report.  Quick Books does it, but isn't very flexible in handling some
> categories of items.
> 

One point that I'd make is that tax seems to roughly double the
complexity of the application.  I prepared recent company/personal tax
accounts using GnuCash; what I found I needed (for australian tax) was:

1. Ability to tag transactions as to whether they're purchase/sale of
capital goods, consumables, loans/bonds, etc.

2. Ability to split/join/associate transactions together. For instance,
here there is a system of "dividend imputation" where when a company
issues a dvidend, some proportion is "franked" and some proportion is
"unfranked"; a tax credit applies to the franked portion, and each
company can choose how much franked/unfranked dividend is handed out. It
would be nice for the interface to support this concept, by creating two
transactions (4 entries) one for the actual dividend and one for the
credit. Similar (but more complex) considerations apply to trust
distributions.

3. (minor) For the share trading report, it would be _really nice_ if it
would record the number of shares traded - this makes calculating CGT
much easier.

Aside from this, an autosave feature would be really nice - I had a fuse
blow and lost a day's work while I was doing this. And all this
suggestion aside, GnuCash is a really capable product.

Patrick.