What is GnuCash for?

[Josh Sled]

On Mon, 2007-04-16 at 05:11 -0700, linuxforrealpeople wrote:
> I would like to ask the designers who they see as their target customer.
[...]
> finance package (Quicken) makes not one mention of double entry
> book-keeping?
[...]
> The concept of double entry book-keeping is of interest (and understood by)
> accountants only (and clever programmers who think they need to understand
> it). Mention d.e.b.c to anyone else and their eyes glaze over. It is a bit

I think the target customer is a person or set of people who need to
account for finances, either personally or for a small enterprise.
Double-entry certainly is more rigorous, but the software should
automate and assist in much of that rigor, allowing users to get the
benefits of double-entry with the ease of less structured systems.

I agree that GnuCash doesn't yet do as much of that automation and
assistance as it could.

There is potentially some state where GnuCash is a full D-E accounting
system, but – as you say – the documentation doesn't need to mention it.
But I'd imagine it's one of those situations where eliminating the last
10% of the "D-E" aspects would take sufficient effort that it's not
worth it.


> If anyone at GnuCash cares I am happy to expand my thesis and offer my time
> and eneregy. Otherwise, goodnight and goodbye.

If you have time and energy to spare, there are plenty of good ways to
contribute: http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Development

Cheers...
-- 
...jsled
http://asynchronous.org/ - a=jsled;b=asynchronous.org; echo ${a}@${b}
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