Giving up on Gnucash

[Rod Engelsman]

Andrew Sackville-West wrote:

> 
> Having just made the switch from QB myself at the turn of the year, I 
> have to agree that its not easy. I personally find it rewarding though 
> to watch the process of development and to participate in whatever small 
> way I can through this list or posting bugs or whatever. One thing to 
> keep in mind, and I hope that this will keep you from being too sour on 
> the whole thing. THat is, GnuCash is "in development" whereas Quickbooks 
> is not. Quickbooks has been a mature accounting package for years and 
> the updates and revisions that come out now are merely fluff. GNuCash is 
> still implementing large parts of its feature set and still dealing with 
> a heavy amount of bugs. I expect, given a few more years, that GnuCash 
> development will reach a level where its basically "done" and all those 
> things you were expecting and looking for will be there.
> 

I switched to Gnucash mid-January as part of my immersion-therapy into 
Linux. I gotta tell you, I really regret that decision now. Try as I 
might I just can't learn to like this thing. A big part of it is that 
I'm using it for personal finance rather than business books, so a lot 
of what I'm looking for in that kind of program simply isn't in Gnucash, 
while it has a lot of stuff I have no use for.

I've grown to despise the UI. So much so that I avoid opening the 
program, which is no way to handle your finances. It seems like every 
single thing that I want to do is harder in Gnucash than MSMoney. 
Features that I use a lot, like importing transactions from my banking 
website, simply don't work nearly as well. The automatisms work just 
well enough to give you the illusion of saving you time, while working 
poorly enough to actually cost you time.

I understand that it's a work in progress. Honestly, what open-source 
app isn't? So while it may not be kosher to complain, that still doesn't 
mean that I have to like the product.


> Intuit was holding my financial data hostage and I had to 
> manually recreate large portions of my books. Anyway, I hope that you 
> won't lose that desire for a better model in accounting software.
>

I'm in just that situation now with Gnucash! I'm a lot more locked into 
this than I was into MSMoney. When I switched over in January I just 
exported my Money accounts as QIF files and imported into GC. But GC 
doesn't have any kind of export function that I can find. So how do I 
get my data back out of this thing in a useful form?


Rod