Oh My God, It Worked!

[Leo L. Schwab]

	When my copy of PHASAR for the Amiga turned out to be Y2K-hostile, I
let my receipts and bank statements pile up while I looked for a new
solution.  GnuCash looked like it could be that solution, but its way of
doing things was sufficiently different from PHASAR's that I resisted
converting.  That resistance crumbled this week.

	I expected to start with v1.6.x, and to that end I downloaded the
Ximian GNOME 1.4 .deb distribution, which is reputed to have nearly all the
necessary up-to-date components.  Then I quickly learned that there's no
GnuCash 1.6.x .deb for Debian Potato (there's one for Debian 'unstable', but
having already traveled that road, I eschewed that option).  Not being
interested in futzing around with ./configure that day, I decided to use
1.4.11 instead, which comes with the Ximian GNOME collection; I could always
upgrade later.

	After creating a list of accounts based largely on the list that had
accumulated in PHASAR over the years, I began the arduous task of entering,
by hand, 22 months worth of saved receipts and check register entries.  This
process took about two and a half days.  (Aside: The thermal paper Safeway
uses to print their receipts can't hold a legible image for more than six
months.  After that, you need a forensic lab to read them.)  Then I dug out
my stack of bank statements and started reconciling, which took another
half-day.

	...And when I was finally done, it balanced!!

	"Oh my God, it worked!"

	I encountered a few quirks along the way (which, admittedly, may or
may not be addressed in 1.6.x).  The biggest was how to handle my (former)
employer's ESPP (employee stock purchase plan) transactions.  Briefly:  We
contribute after-tax salary to an individual account which, every six
months, is used to purchase shares of company stock at a 15% discount.  We
then have the option of sitting on the purchased shares, or flipping them
the same/next day for current market price.

	I wasn't sure how to set this up.  I created a "holding" account
which held ESPP contributions, and a stock account for actual NASDAQ:BEOS
shares.  I tranferred the money in the holding account to the stock account,
and set the share purchase price accordingly.  Then, in the immediately
following transaction, I transferred the shares at the sale price to my
checking account.

	Problem:  The purchase price was 5.7; the sale price was 11.875
(yeah, we were lucky just that once).  As a result, the transfer to checking
had an invisible extra half-cent.  This made reconciling the account
impossible.  Even though the reconcile dialog reported a difference of
$0.00, it was really $0.005, and the "Finish" gadget wouldn't light up.  I
eventually went back to the Stock account, and changed the transaction to an
exact amount of cash.  This made the checking account balance again, but the
stock account now has a balance of -0.00004 of a share.  Is there another
way I should have handled this to avoid epsilon creeping in?  How do you
charge off stuff like this?

	Another minor irritation:  When I shop at Safeway, sometimes I get
cash back from my ATM card, and sometimes I don't (or I pay cash).  If I get
cash back, I have to enter a split transaction, which requires multi-line
mode.  If I don't, I don't want the split there at all.  GnuCash 1.4.11
automatically fills the entry in with a copy of the most recently entered
transaction of the same description, including splits.  So I kept having to
flip back and forth between multi-line and single-line display modes.  It
would have been nicer if GnuCash had automatically switched to multi-line
mode when it duplicated a split transaction.  (GNOME's tear-off menus made
switching back and forth far less painful, but it was still a minor
annoyance.)

	I also noticed that GnuCash would sometimes report as split a
transaction that had only two components (single source and single target).
After poking at the user interface, I realized there was a third component
that was *completely blank*.  Deleting the component fixed the problem.
Shouldn't GnuCash delete or ignore transaction components that are
completely blank?  (Or does it merely *look* completely blank?)  

	Another quirk:  When duplicating a transaction for entry, it will
also duplicate the contents of the memo field which, in general, seems
counter-productive.  In single-line mode, there's no hint to indicate the
memo field is non-blank; you have to switch to double-line mode.  Perhaps a
little checkmark somewhere on the line would be helpful?

	And finally a point of interest:  When reconciling accounts, PHASAR
on Amiga recorded (sort of) the date of the statement that reconciled the
transaction.  Does GnuCash also record the reconciling statement's date?  Is
this viewable?

	Getting started with a new financial tracking package is always the
hardest part -- a lesson I learned (and forgot) long ago with PHASAR -- and
I probably made it much harder on myself than I needed to.  But I'm a pack
rat, and don't like to discard anything.  Though discontinuous across two
machines, my financial record is once again complete.  Thanks, guys!

	Now where's that copy of UAE?

					Schwab