praise (and an idea or two) for Gnucash

Shane Litherland litherland-farm at bigpond.com
Tue Jan 31 20:27:01 EST 2012


Hi all,

I'm into my fourth or fifth financial year now, of using GNUcash to sort
out my accounting ( a small family farm business). In that time, I
reckon GNUcash has polished up pretty well :-)

Even when I started using it, it was a fairly capable setup, but I must
say that over the past few years, the ease-of-use and versatility has
improved noticeably. At one stage I did look into alternatives that were
SQL-database based because I envisaged SQL could help me
report/sort/analyse my accounts in ways that were then limited in
GNUcash... but about that time, GNUcash started moving towards
SQL-databases itself as an option (yay!), not to mention the gradual
improvement in aspects of the business tools/options.

I don't have any need for everything in GNUcash, so can't apply my
comments/experience to all facets (e.g. don't download bank statements,
or deal with stocks/shares etc). I have made extensive use of the
general business and reporting aspects though. I went so far as to edit
one of the scheme files to customise an invoice for myself, and although
I'd like to play more with custom reports in various languages
(including making more use of the SQL database option) I haven't yet
found the time to delve into those aspects.

In more recent versions (I'm now on on 2.4.9  built from r21841M on
2012-01-28, on ubuntu 10.04.3 64 bit) there have been aspects
added/improved that probably halve the time I spend entering details for
bills. That's a good thing indeed.

Or maybe it's not... ;-} because I have a bit more time to think about
how I'm using GNUcash...
...and there will always be something, or someone, that raises the
bar...
As a result... here's an idea or two I've just had:

when entering 'description' for a bill (same for an invoice?) there's an
autofill happening which is one of the things I find speeds up my data
entry. Sometimes though, I have a few descriptions that start with
similar words e.g. 'phone bill private calls', 'phone bill business
calls', 'phone bill internet private' etc. Currently GNUcash recalls the
most recent one I've used in the autofill. I can move cursor along and
start changing the relevant words and the autofill will 'catch up' and
continue to fill the other fields of the split with the right info.
But sometimes, I may not always recall the different wording i've used
for previous bills (did I use 'phone' or 'telephone' or 'ph' or
'landline' ?? currently I type in each to see if my guesses are on
track) so here's where a list-box, similar to what has been added to the
'Vendor' field in the 'Billing information' dialog, would be a further
improvement to GNUcash's versatility. possibly even adding the 'search'
option (similar again to what's available for the vendor/job option in
bill entry) as well, because that isn't as strict in word order etc as
the autofill/listbox.

Another small idea, is that when posting a bill or making a payment, the
description/memo field is blank by default. I know that bills can have
multiple splits, but sometimes, a bill may be only one split, or a few
splits with a similar description for each (see phone e.g.'s above).

So I have found that it would be handy to have those description/memo
fields in posting/paying default to the description used for the split
on the bill (rather than re-typing or copy/pasting as I currently do).
In the event that the bill has multiple splits, maybe the default could
be the first entry, or last entry, or (getting complicated now) the
first word/s of any entries that match up (e.g. for phone example, it
could return 'phone bill' as the common phrase across all splits).

This proposition could be implemented in the 'posting' dialog; if the
user then wishes to add/change the description they can. For the
'payment' dialog, the memo field could default to the 'description'
field already entered for the 'posting' dialog which would help provide
consistency in the GNUcash records for later reading/searching etc.
Again, if the user wants something different like "OMG I forgot to pay
this last week, look out for a fine" ;-} they can still put it in.

This idea could be duplicated for the 'invoices' section too, and maybe
even when entering txns/splits directly in and account ledger??

Having a rough idea of how data is queried behind-the-scenes for
listboxes and search tools, I think that what has already been designed
elsewhere in GNUcash (e.g. in the 'billing info' when editing/adding a
bill) could be readily adapted to these other parts of GNUcash... though
people in-the-know on this aspect may wish to correct my brash
assumption here??

so - comments anyone? you think it's a reasonable enhancement request to
make?

-shane.




More information about the gnucash-user mailing list