GnuCash - Newbie - Experiences / Questions

[Fien.Remerie]

	Hi,

I'm considering to switch from MS-Money 97 to GnuCash, as I'm gradually
switching my personal compute environment to Linux.

Please allow me to share my experiences and questions. GnuCash looks
extremely attractive and well developped (otherwise I wouldn't even
bother about mailing ...)

Nevertheless, here I go :

1) Working on Suse 6.4, there was no rpm available for GnuCash 1.6.1. So
I did compile the whole thing from source. I was surprised by the
enormous amount of dependencies (well indicated by the configure
process, I must admit). Looks like I updated the complete gnome
environment ... But finally I managed, although some of my later
mentioned problems may be related to this installation. 

I guess an end-user product should become much more friendly to install.
Having programming skills myself , I can live with it.

2) The QIF importing worked AMAZINGLY well ! Congratulations. I only
lost some time on language issues. I was using a Dutch version of Money.
It seems that this writes out QIF-files in Dutch !! (unbelievable in
fact that the datastructures are language dependent) Maybe it would be a
good idea to
  a) warn somewhere in the importing process for this possible
difficulty
  b) build in here language dependency too.
For your reference, those where the translations I needed to do in the
QIF, basically to match the account type :

"kas" -> "cash"
"ov b" -> "oth a" (asset)

Sidenote : If GnuCash serves my needs and if someone can give me
instructions how to do, I may consider doing a tranlation to Dutch.

3) (for me, very important) I have some loans running. I think I
understand the process of tracking them in liability accounts.
Nevertheless I miss enormously the MS Money possibility to have the loan
automatically calculated and entered with split capital/interest. I read
the mailing lists before, and it looks like this is high on the wish
lists in general.

I would like absolutely a solution for that one. But I can live with a
scripting (non GUI) solution that enters the thing f.i. via crontabs or
whatsoever.

Anybody suggestions (or instruction how to start it myself ?)

This brings me also with 

4) Scheduled transactions would be enormously helpful. Also here I can
live with a scripting solution for the time being.

5) One of the most used reports in Money is for me 'where does the money
stay ?'

I understand I can do this somehow with a transaction report and setting
the right options (accounts, amount as primary key ..) but this is
somehow 'spartan'. On top of that it looks like every session I have to
set again all options for this report. Can one save reports (I mean the
settings to generate it) ? Can one define additional reports and
integrate them in the GUI menu's ?

6) To a lesser extent I miss also the 'who does receive my money' report
from Money. This looks harder to solve as 'payee' is completely missing
in the GnuCash concept, isn't it ?

7) Money has some nice graph representations. On my GnuCash, all request
for graphical output ends in segmentation faults ... Maybe related to
1). Anybody hints where and how to start hunting for the problem ?


Best regards and keep this good work going !!!

Fien