Startup time

Mike or Penny Novack stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com
Mon Aug 17 12:00:00 EDT 2009


>>Perhaps a bit of design philosophy here: it seems that the target
>>aaudience for GnuCash is business users, who open it first thing in
>>the morning and shut it down last thing at night.  For them, I think
>>that it is tremendous.  For them, the startup time doesn't matter.
>>They can set it to start automatically on bootup.
>>    
>>
>
>The target audience is definitely not just business users.
>However 15s of startup time is perfectly reasonable.  OOo takes
>that long to start up.
>
The objection to "long start-up time" I find a bit strange. Yes I guess 
you could call me a "business user" (organizational user) but I 
seriously doubt that many "personal user" users have as few transactions 
per month (typically under 100 per YEAR). I am most certainly NOT 
opening first thing in the morning every day. I am opening it only when 
I have something to enter, though quite naturally I might sensibly wait 
till I had two or three, especially if there was a credit card statement 
or bank statement to match against what people might have told me in 
emails (mistakes not uncommon). See, while "on line" is available for 
both the credit card account(s)* and the bank accounts using that 
feature would be silly in the extreme in our case with such a low 
transaction volume.

The point I am making is that even were I entering just one transaction, 
the time to do that making sure all was correct going to dwarf start up 
time. There is of course a factor of being sensible about work flow. 
Your experience with "start up time" is going to be different if you:

1) Start the application and while it loads, open the file drawer and 
reach into the folder for "unentered activity" and spread these out on 
your desk.
       Or
2) Open the file drawer and reach into the folder of "unentered 
activity" and only when you have these arranged on your desk do you 
start the application.

In other words, I would say that if you find yourself opening and 
closing the application several times a day then it's your "work flow" 
you need to examine. No sensible bookkeeper would be doing that. Perhaps 
using it for something other that "personal bookkeeping"?

Michael

* This is a business account so there is a master number on which 
payments are made but besides the master statement you get individual 
statements for each card holder. I really do need to see that before 
entirely trusting what the email says (in particular the organizational 
secretary is very bad about remembering correctly whether she put some 
item on her credit card or her bank card. Perhaps 50-50 I found out when 
I see the bank statement or the credit card statement that what she 
wrote in her email to me was wrong way around).


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