Quickfill Issues

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Daniel Trezub <daniel3ub at gmail.com> writes:

> Have you ever used MS Money, Derek? If not, I'd suggest you to give it a try.
> Seriously. I am really LOVING the entire Gnucash experience, but there is room
> to improvement.

Nope, I haven't.  Nor have I used Quicken.  I've actually seen
quickbooks but I haven't personally used it, either.

Of course there is always room for improvement, but also keep in mind
what got us where we are.  GnuCash is (and always has been) a volunteer
project.  Nobody has ever been paid (directly or indirectly) to work on
GnuCash.  We don't have a Red Hat or Canonical employee who's job is to
work on GnuCash.  Right now GnuCash is being maintained by pretty much
one person.

The fact that you can even compare GnuCash to those other products
speaks miles to the benefits of Open Source!  How many full-time
developers, designers, UI people, etc do you think are or have worked on
those products?

> Look, I am not making fun with Gnucash or something, it just happens that
> reports and graphs in gnucash are not as intuitive or easy or fast as the ones
> in MS Money. And as I came from it, it's natural that I miss this ease of use
> and generation of reports and graphs.

See the above.  Yes, the reports could use improvements.  Some of these
improvements are coming in 2.4 (moving from gtkhtml to webkit, adding
CSS support, and the introduction of some e-guile reports).  As for the
speed of the reports, there are also some speed improvement patches in
the 2.3/2.4 sources which should help some.  Much of the speed issue is
due to poor algorithm choices on the part of the report writers over the
years.

> I am not saying that Gnucash does not have this feature. What I am saying is
> that it's not as easy or complete as the competition.

See above..

> You can get a pie chart from every item on every record in MS$. You get a
> expenses report, for example. If you want a pie chart for this same expenses
> report, it's just a click or two away from this very same screen. If you want
> a bar graph for some sub-account, the same applies.

True, getting to the reports is a little more challenging.  You can
still run the various reports from anywhere but you still have to wait
for the default report to run before you can configure the report how
you want.

> I didn't get a "Cash Flow Forecast" graph yet in Gnucash, for example.

I'm not sure what this is..  How is it supposed to guess what will
happen in the future?  Yes, it could guess based on your SXes, but not
all SXes have well-defined values, some are just variables.  The report
would need to ask how to run each SX.

> Or a "Top Five Expenses Categories" report.

I suspect one could use the transaction report or P&L as a basis for
this.  The P&L with a sort-order by total, perhaps?  And then a limit on
the number of entries?

> Or two pie charts, side by side, comparing the current and the last month, for
> a given account and its sub-accounts.

This you can do now.  Create a multi-column (custom) report and then put
the two pie-charts into the two columns configured with your two months.

> I was planning on discussing this issues here next week or later, so I could
> then fill in the enhancement requests. Thanks for putting this up earlier :)

You're welcome.

We're always looking at ways to enhance GnuCash, but you have to keep in
mind that just presenting good ideas is not enough.  We need those ideas
to get transformed into code too.  You can't release an idea ;)

> Cheers!

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available