Newbie's experience with gnucash

[Bill Gribble]

On Sun, Oct 15, 2000 at 11:43:25PM -0600, Eric Schwartz wrote:
> The problem is, I cannot seem to wrap my head around gnucash.  I'm
> not claiming I'm an accounting god, or anything (for one thing, this
> is the first I've seen of double-entry accounting), but some things I
> just can't understand!

Thanks for taking the time to write up your impressions.  It is
important for gnucash to be accessible to new users, and the bad news
for you is that we still have a way to go.  The good news is that the
learning curve is not very steep, and if you can wrap your head around
one or two "concept mappings" from Quicken to Gnucash you will be fine
in no time.

First of all, forget that you ever heard the word "double entry".
Yes, it's there, but it's more an implementation detail than something
you have to worry about directly.  All you need to remember is that
what Quicken calls "Categories", gnucash calls "accounts", and what
Quicken calls "Accounts", gnucash also calls accounts :), and
furthermore, every financial entry has to have a "category" in
addition to the bank account that it's drawn from.

Second, keep in mind that Gnucash isn't just "free Quicken".  It's a
different program, one that has similar goals but not exactly
identical, and you have to reconcile yourself to the idea that there
will be a bit of a learning process while you get used to this new
piece of software.  Just because you are an Adobe Photoshop expert
doesn't mean you can just open up Illustrator and start working;
different programs have different paradigms, even if they are
superficially similar.

> Should I have picked the CSV?  They also offer Quicken 98 and 99 version
> of QIFs.  Does it matter which one I use?

Use the QIF.  We can't currently import CSV, though it's on the todo
list.  It doesn't matter which format you choose.

> * Set the opening balance of my accounts.
> 
> This is where double-entry bookkeeping rears its ugly head.  I don't
> understand how to say, "This account started off having this much
> money in it."  When I do that, it creates an "Imbalance-USD" account
> with the opposite amount of money as I just put in my checking and
> savings accounts.

It's a good question, and one that will be swept under the rug when we
have a better new-account setup routine.  Gnucash (like accountants,
and normal people like you) understands that there are times when
money just "appears" from outside the scope of your accounting
procedures.  This type of money is called "Equity".  Opening balances
are generally considered to be transfers from an account called
"Retained Earnings" which is of type "Equity".  If you want, you can
call the account "Opening Balances", and just think of this as a
special category for opening balances that doesn't show up on income
and expense reports.  There is a reason it's called Retained Earnings
by accountants, having to do with the rollup of expenses and income,
but that won't really affect you if you prefer the name Opening
Balances.

> * Imported the savings and checking QIF files, assigning them to the
>   corresponding accounts.
>
> I type in the filename, select the account I want it to go in, and
> make sure that's reflected under the Accounts tab.

Tha's correct.

> Then I go to the Categories tab.  It has the exactsame number of
> transactions as were in my checking QIF file.  It wants a GNUCash
> Account Name.  Why?  What's this for?  I don't get it.

Gnucash calls Quicken Categories "accounts".  You need to have an
Income or Expense account for each Income or Expense category in
Quicken, and this screen shows how they are related to each other.

> Much whirring and chunking of hard drive ensues.  When I'm done, the
> balances in my Checking and Savings accounts are accurate, but now I
> have a Random account with (apparently) the inverse of all the 
> transactions I just imported.  I don't need this, but I can't figure
> out how to make it go away. 

What you told Gnucash was that you wanted to merge all of your Quicken
Categories into one called "Random".  I doubt that was what you wanted
to do.  If you just left the defaults alone, you would have ended up
with a direct mapping of all your Quicken categories to Gnucash ones
of the same name.

Since the QIF importer remembers your selections, you should probably
erase the cache file before starting this process over.  It is in the
file ~/.gnucash/qif-accounts-map.  Just delete the file and gnucash
will do the right thing.

> There seems to be a major paradigm shift involved in using gnucash,
> and I'm not sure what the benefit of making it is.  As far as I can
> tell, double-entry accounting is just single-entry accounting with
> everything written twice.  What's the point?  

If you buy food with money from your bank, the amount of Food goes up
and the amount in Bank goes down.  That's "double entry" because the
same amount appears in Food and Bank accounts.  It's really no
different from the way Quicken presents it to you, except that instead
of moving money from your bank into your Food expense category you
move it into your Food expense account.

BTW, Chris Browne and others have written documentation of all of this
stuff which is available as on-line help in gnucash.  The help in the
QIF importer has a description of the categories and accounts issue,
which might be a good place to start if the above isn't helpful.

Bill Gribble