Tracking stocks and sales - improving GnuCash

[Todd Wells]

Hi, I've been using GnuCash for a month now.  Since I know the developer(s) are open to usability suggestions, I'd like to make a couple.

First my perspective -- I'm a longtime Quicken user.  I like Quicken.  But I switched to a Mac about 4-5 years ago now, and the unfortunate truth is that Quicken for the Mac is a buggy beast that resulted in the corruption of my data files on more than one occasion.  And I have some objections to Intuit's business practices. So I just can't deal with Quicken anymore.  So I decided to give Gnucash a try, since there doesn't appear to be much in the way of finance software for Macs.  I'm not an accountant, so the double-entry stuff is a little foreign to me, but I can (try to) learn.  I'm also a programmer/tester, so I'm pretty comfortable with software in general.

As fate would have it, I have a diversity of mutual fund investments.  Let's say 10-20, at any given time.  So there's a fair amount of tracking that has to go on.  Getting an investment set up in GnuCash seems pretty straightforward.  Having to set up Finance::Quote went fairly smoothly, but I feel like that functionality should be built-in to GnuCash and "just work".  But that wasn't much of an issue.

The real frustration for me comes when I sell a mutual fund or stock.  I have the help/user guide printouts in front of me to walk me through it, but it's just plain difficult to get the splits correct.  Not only that, but I have to figure out the capital gains!  Now, for me, one reason I use financial software is because IT DOES THE HARD STUFF FOR ME.  Alas, this doesn't appear to be true for selling stock in GnuCash.  Every time I go to sell, I have to dig out the printouts and hope I get it all "just right".  So, my recommendation for developers: make a "druid" (or whatever you want to call it) to make this stuff easier.  I shouldn't need to read instructions whenever I want to sell a stock, the software should walk me through it and do the hard calculations and splits for me.  Quicken really does this stuff much easier, and I recommend you give it a try if only to see how the competition does it.

Also, how do I look at the current price of a stock?  It would be nice to have a simple view (like the Quicken portfolio view) that tells you at a glance your portfolio and the share prices and changes for that day.  I know there's a portfolio report, but that's not quite the same thing, as far as I can tell.  Maybe it's there, I just haven't found it.

Is there a way to turn off the "transaction memorization" feature?  Sometimes this is useful, but when the last memorized transaction is a split, it's kind of a pain.

All in all, GnuCash seems to be a pretty well-built piece of software, and I appreciate that.  But to appeal to the consumer (and not just the hard-core accounting types), it needs a little more polish, in my opinion.  I hope to continue to use GnuCash.  If I understood accounting at a higher level I would consider contributing as a programmer, but alas my accounting knowledge is fairly simplistic and I don't have any experience with guile.

Thanks for your ears,

-Todd