Comparison of GnuCash

[Guus Bonnema]

On Wed, 20 Mar 2013 00:15:08 +0000
Steve Fosdick <sjflists at btinternet.com> wrote:

> 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.
> 
<snip>
> 
> 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.
> 

KMyMoney also assumes you have the Payee in description. When you import the
complete GnuCash data into KMyMoney, the Payee result is completely unusable,
because it only looks at description, not at memo or note. Usually description
has a transaction ID or ATM id and date or such: this results in one Payee for
each transaction ..... :(

if you could create a rule set to connect transactions to Payees, that would go
a long way to improving usability and function.

I still use KmyMoney as a read only because I like the reporting. I
periodically import the Gnucash data into Kmymoney to use the reporting.

> 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 feel that we need a separate Payee entity where connecting to Payee
would be more or less automatic, through some set of selection criteria. Maybe
correctable through the import window. This would be a nice to have as I do
feel some other stuff is more important (like easy to build reports).

> 
> 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.

Yes, it does. Still, I never thought of doing it this way.

Guus Bonnema.