I'd like to say thanks to the developers

Derek Atkins warlord at MIT.EDU
Fri May 7 16:33:37 EDT 2004


Hi,

Ben Pracht <bpracht at nc.rr.com> writes:

> For what its worth, I wanted to take the time to say thanks to all those who
> developed this product, especially the more recent versions.  It is
> one of my
> favorite open source projects.  Here's why:

Thanks for the feedback!

[snip]
> *  The QFX import feature works really well.  I'm amazed sometimes at
>    how accurate it
> can detect existing transactions.  Aside from wishing I could select a
> matching account via
> keyboard in addition to a mouse, it works really well.  I had problems
> with QIF, though.

You didn't say exactly which version you're using, but modern (1.8.9)
Gnucash should be _pretty_ good with QIF.  Unfortunately lots of banks
output "broken" QIF, so it's hard to get it all right.  If you have
specific issues with 1.8.9, please file a bug report and attach a sample
of QIF that imports incorrectly.

[snip]
> I'd also like to request these features:
> *  Could someone create a transaction number that's short enough to be
>    written on
> my receipts?  I'd like Gnucash to autoincrement this for me, and tell
> me which number
> to write down.  That way, if I ever needed to say, return something, I
> can go to Gnucash,
> lookup a transaction, and see that it was filed as transaction #4396,
> or something, and find that in a bin somewhere.  In otherwords, help
> me track my supporting *paper* documentation.

Well, the business invoice/bill/exp-voucher system does this for you.
Is that what you're looking for?  I'm not sure how an
auto-incrementing txn number is useful in the general case.

> *  Create a key to goto a specific date within an account ledger, or
>    to the beginning or end
> of it.

PageUp and PageDown will go up and down a page.  Shift-PageUp will go to
the top, Shift-PageDown will go to the end.  There's no key to go to a
specific date -- how would you enter in the date to jump to in a
key binding?

> *  Add account information fields, such as contact information  for
>    say, banks, accounts
> payables, receivables, etc.

This sounds like you want to use the business features, where you can
put contact information into the vendor information (for payables) and
customer information (for receivables).  No, there isn't much room for
Bank account information, but you could use the Name+Description for
that information.

> *  Speed of importing transactions, and startup is somewhat slow.  At
>    the risk of sounding heretical, maybe an XML repository isn't the
>    best approach.  I'd be willing to have a completely unreadable
>    binary format that performed better.  I don't have the time to
>    directly modify or write XSL scripts to process the Gnucash format
>    anyway.

Preaching to the choir.  My hope is to move to a SQLite embedded DB as
the default file storage mechanism, and leave XML as an import/export
interchange format.  I agree completely that XML sucks as a data
storage format.  I'm HOPING this will be finished for 2.0, but....

We'll see.

> Thanks for the good work,
> Ben Pracht

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available


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