General Journal

[Buddha Buck]

On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 11:52 AM, <cgw993 at aol.com> wrote:

> Stating that the journal is equivalent to the ledger makes no sense. This
> is
> how the quickbooks and peachtree message boards sound.    This really means
> that and on the 2nd Tuesday of every 3rd moon you do this to achieve that.
> They cannot possibly be equivalent.  What GC has done is to create a clone
> of some proprietary software that also did it wrong on purpose.   That was
> probably the correct choice for GC because they needed to provide something
> for people to switch to that was similar to what they were already using,
> but that was free software.
>

When banks offer downloads in Quicken format (or derivatives thereof),
GnuCash (or any other software which wants to import this data from banks)
must use what information is available in that format.

Personally, I do not see GnuCash as similar to Quicken.  If anything, I see
it as similar to Peachtree, or other professional DE-accounting packages
I've used.  Guess what: they didn't use a General Journal as the main
data-entry tool either.  I learned DE-bookkeeping long before Quicken was
released; heck, I wrote DE-bookkeeping software before Quicken was
released.  From the beginning, I knew Quicken got it wrong, in terms of
artificially simplifying the DE process to make it easier for
non-bookkeepers to keep books.  I use GnuCash because GnuCash gets it
right, and is not a Quicken clone.