Question Re: ANNOUNCE: Announcement: GnuCash 2.6.6 Release 2015-03-30

[John Ralls]

> On Apr 1, 2015, at 6:47 PM, Steve Suehs <skelter at skelter.net> wrote:
> 
> John,
> 
> It is nice to see GnuCash progressing and  under active development.
> 
> One of the things I used to love about GnuCash way way back in the day was a shared backend database with PostgreSQL. My dream, at the time, was that both my wife and I could be in the system and both working on it for our family finances.  It didn't actually work out that way.  
> 
> Every few years, I take a look at what is out there.  I rarely find something available for couples, or roommates, or communes, or small organizations.  Have you seen anything? 
> 
> Best wishes, and congrats on another GnuCash release!
> 

Thanks for the good wishes, but please remember to send all correspondence to the list, not to individual developers.

As you probably know if you've been following the mailing list for the last year, we're working on redesigning the GnuCash core ("engine") to be a true database application instead of simply using the database as an alternative to an XML file as that early, unsuccessful, Postgres backend did and as our current SQL backend does. There's a lot of work to be done and I'm currently the only one doing it (Aaron Laws contributed a couple of modules last fall but has since been too busy with real life to contribute further), so it's going to take a very long time.

As for other accounting applications, I don't know of any that are oriented towards personal finances and can support multiple simultaneous users. The mechanics of Accounting are pretty much the same no matter what sort of entity you're keeping the books for, so the only reason not to use an enterprise-grade package like OpenERP or Grisby might be that they support only accrual accounting. I've not used any of those packages so I don't know for sure.

ISTM though that it shouldn't be too hard to make sure that your wife and you aren't working on bookkeeping at the same time, so I'd think that you could use a shared GnuCash file without too much trouble. Administering a DB server is a PITA, so I'd recommend just using a shared folder to keep a GnuCash XML or SQLite3 file. Dropbox and Google Drive are also known to work, though the latency in any remote service can be big enough to cause a race for setting the lock file if both of you happen to try  to work on accounts at the same time.

Regards,
John Ralls