Impressions of 1.6.x

[Keith Refson]

I finally took the plunge and have upgraded to 1.6.2 from 1.4 on my
Solaris box.  It took a weekend to get all the dependencies installed,
including a complete new gnome installation. (This, however is *much*
easier than it used to be as Sun have a trial install of 1.4 available
for free download, or you can order a CD-ROM. Perhaps the GNUCASH web
pages should include a link to http://www.sun.com/gnome?).

Compilation was *mostly* smooth, except for the interface to Guppi,
and I had to hand-edit the makefiles to include the half-dozen
necessary Guppi libraries.

I was impressed by the automatic import of my 1.4 data.  The interface
looks good and slick and I *do* like the new integrated report types.
One thing I was hoping for but haven't seen yet is year-end closing of
accounts.


I have two small questions about usage, which might suggest some extra
functionality improvements..

1. The UK banking system retains some rather antediluvian practices
   which mean that your money vanishes into the ether for 4 or 5 days
   during many transactions such as cheque payments and BACS
   (inter-bank account transfers).  (Actually I suspect it vanishes
   into an interest-bearing account where the banks cream off the
   interest!)  This causes some problems with the double-entry
   accounting system which assumes transfers occur on the same date.

   At the moment I just ignore it which means the transaction dates on
   the receiving account disagree with the official statement of that
   account. Any suggestions on a better way to handle this?  Setting
   up an intermediate account to keep the money for a few days would
   require a lot of work, and furthermore you would lose the benefit
   of seeing the destination in the transfer field.

2. What is the best way of handling brokers charges and (in the UK)
   stamp duty on share (stock) transactions.  Should these be entered
   into the brokers account, which seems to be the only way of
   including them at the moment.  This does not fit comfortably with
   the way that the broker's statements handle this.  More
   importantly, how can they be taken into account in portfolio profit
   and loss calculations?

My only remaining difficulty now is not of Gnucash's making -- my new
online bank (Smile) don't support statement exporting so I must input
them by hand.  I'm tempted to write a PERL program to extract the info
from the  HTML pages and convert it into QIF for import.

In any case, congratulations for a fine and tremendously useful
application. 

Keith Refson
-- 
Dr Keith Refson,        "Paradigm is a word too often used by those who would
Dept of Earth Sciences      like to have a new idea but cannot think of one." 
Parks Road,                  -- Mervyn King, Deputy Governor, Bank of England
Oxford OX1 3PR, UK        
Keith.Refson@                       Tel: 01865 272026
             earth.ox.ac.uk         Fax: 01865 272072