GnuCash vs. Quicken

[Shayne Lennox]

Hi,

At 06:34 AM 8/12/2002, Karl F. Larsen wrote:
>Hi Thomas, your accountant friend is correct. Double book keeping is a
>royal pain in the ass, and not required for a personal checking account
>and credit card system. But the unpaid writers of gnucash decided, in
>error I think, to make the software complex enough to do professional
>Double Entry Book Keeping.
>
>         Once they get a few more bugs out I will equip my 2 professional
>Book Keepers with both Linux and gnucash and see if it really works.
>
>         Quickin knows who uses their software and will never force
>double entry on their customer base.

I used Quicken for several months before I got annoyed at its telephone 
activation requirement (in the Australian version) when reinstalling. When 
this pushed me to search for an alternative and I read about GnuCash, on 
slashdot for example, the issue of double-entry and what a pain in the 
behind it is was always brought up. I didn't know what double-entry was, 
but my initial thought was that it meant I would have to enter every 
transaction twice (manually), which would indeed be a pain.

When I loaded GnuCash on Mandrake, read the help file, set up my accounts, 
and fiddled with it for a while, it became clear that this double-entry 
thing was virtually a non issue. I only have to enter each transaction 
once, as I did in Quicken. And the "accounts" required by double-entry are 
virtually synonymous with Quicken's "categories". The only difference, for 
me, is that it's kind of nice having everything as an "account" instead of 
a "category" because it's quicker and easier to view and manage them.

The main issue with double-entry (or the way it works in GnuCash) is 
handling of foreign currency transactions. Doing a withdrawal from my USD 
PayPal account to my AUD bank account can be quite confusing, and having 
separate accounts with " - USD" tacked on the end is a pain as well as 
being kind of ugly to look at.

Most other issues I have with GnuCash have nothing to do with double-entry. 
For example, the accounts tree always being collapsed when I start the 
program, the description column in the accounts tree not adjusting 
properly, the lack of auto-save, not being able to clear a split easily, 
not being able to do an automatic "balance adjustment" in cash accounts, 
everything after the "&" character in the memo field disappearing, the 
"find" function not working half the time, having to do 
update-finance-quote (worked in Red Hat, didn't work in Mandrake), the 
price editor updating currencies but not my ASX shares, the lack of 
scheduled transactions, the lack of forecast-based reports/graphs, and all 
the rest and so forth, have nothing to do with double-entry :-)

I know some of these issues are addressed in the next version, although I 
don't yet have the confidence with Linux to install anything other than 
what's included with the distribution.

On GnuCash vs Quicken, I think Quicken is superior for Joe User wanting to 
manage his personal finances. In order for me to gain the motivation 
required to switch to GnuCash and boot into Linux once a day just to use 
it, I had to become extremely irate at Quicken's forced registration and 
activation. Joe User probably won't. I recall reading comments from the 
developers of a year or two ago positioning GnuCash as a competitor to 
Quicken, but I find it hard to believe. GnuCash in its present form seems 
to appeal mainly to advanced users.

On the other hand, I am glad that GnuCash offered me a pretty decent 
alternative, particularly when you remember that it hasn't been around for 
nearly as long as Quicken, and that it's maintained by volunteers who have 
a limited amount of time/motivation to work on it.

Regards,

Shayne Lennox

P.S. How come David Gilbert's excellent user guide at 
http://www.object-refinery.com/gnucash/ doesn't get mentioned more often?