Comparison of GnuCash

Steve Fosdick sjflists at btinternet.com
Tue Mar 19 20:15:08 EDT 2013


I was reading through the recent archive and spotted a message in which
a chap made a comparison between GnuCash and Skrooge including a
YouTube video and made ease of use type comments, particularly with
reference to the application doing what he expected it to do.

I have used GnuCash for a while now but I was browsing the Google Play
the other day and noticed a selection of Android Apps for money
management. The idea of being able to enter transactions on my phone,
especially unreceipted ones, and also have a up to date balance for
accounts and cards that takes account of those transactions is very
appealing.

One of the Apps works with Money Manager EX so I gave that a quick test
drive.  Having read the message I mentioned at the start I also looked
very briefly at Skrooge.  There are some notable differences between
GnuCash and these other applications:

1. In the other applications there seem to be two distinct types of
transaction: payments, i.e. transactions that deal with an external
source of income or an external destination for expenditure, and
transfers which move money between accounts kept within the
application.  By comparison all GnuCash transactions are transfers.

2. As a knock on effect of this GnuCash seems to be more flexible in
the way split transactions can be used.  As an example, imagine I
receive one of those gift cards that works a bit like an account, i.e.
you can use it as a payment method and the balance is reduced as you
spend.  I can model this in GnuCash as an asset account.  Imagine the
card is running out so a particular trip to the shop clears the
remaining balance and I have to make up the difference by paying on a
regular credit card.  Also imagine that I buy a range of items that
cross at least two different expenditure accounts.  In GnuCash I can
enter a split transaction with two source accounts (the gift card and
the credit card) and two destination accounts (the two expense accounts)
without any problem.  I have not found a way to do something like this
in these other applications.

3. The two other applications I used seemed to be limited to two levels
of expense category whereas GnuCash's account hierarchy does not have
a limit that I have encountered.

4. The other applications attach both a payee and a category to
payment transactions, i.e. to whom the money was paid and for what are
effectively two different dimensions.  When entering payments directly
into the register for either the source of funds or the expense account
there doesn't appear to be a structured way to do this in GnuCash.  It
is possible, of course, to use the description to record the payee and
the expense account to record the type of expense and, interestingly,
the Skrooge import of GnuCash files assumes you have done that.  In
practice this is not what I have done - for bigger purchases I have
often put what was bought into the description too so I can find it
again easily, for ATM transactions I have put the location of the ATM
etc.

On this last point what do other people do?  One one occasion I was
curious to see what proportion of the money we spend on groceries was
spend with the major supermarkets in our area so I created sub-accounts
for each supermarket under the groceries expense account but this seems
to have made seeing the total for all groceries harder.

I assume one possibility would be to use the business feature and log
receipts as bills via accounts payable so that the various payees are
then set up as suppliers.  That does seem rather long winded, though.


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