How do _you_ use GNUCash for personal finances?

[Mark Phillips]

Patrick,

I use Gnucash for both personal and business accounting. I have several
"books" - two non-profits, my personal finances, a for profit company, and
my parent's trust, which I manage.

Gnucash is very flexible in that it works well in all these environments -
business (for profit and not for profit), personal, and trust accounting. I
have even used it to track some small inventory for the non-profits, but it
is not really designed to do that. It is just a really good accounting
package.

For the personal accounting side, I use the budgeting part of Gnucash at
this time each year, and then track expenses and income against that. I
don't do a lot of stocks/bonds as my brokerage accounts do that for me - I
just update the totals in Gnucash. I also don't import bank statements - I
reconcile my accounts by hand each month. It gives me a real sense of what
happened the previous month.

I haven't delved into creating custom reports, even though the trust
accounting book needs that. It seems that attorneys and the courts (US,
Arizona) have developed their own version of accounting reports which have
no relationship to balance sheets and income statements - and they (lawyers
and judges) won't read the standard business accounting reports (balance
sheets and income statements).  It took awhile for me to understand the
trust accounting report format, so I just export the transactions from
Gnucash into a spreadsheet when I need a trust financial report.

Hope that helps!

Mark

BTW, you have been asking some really good questions - I have enjoyed
reading and learning from them!

On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 2:09 AM, Richard Bishopp <rbishopp44 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Patrick.   I am not an accountant or have any sort of that type of
> education except math in HS and college so I've been following your other
> email chain to glean new info.
>
> To answer your question here, I use gnucash to see where my money goes. I
> know where it comes from, my paycheck.  I normally look at the asset
> accounts values only and rarely look at the expense account values.   I do
> 99% of my recording in the asset account from which I spend the money.
> Even with my container deposits when I take them back for a nickel each is
> recorded in my asset account:cash on hand and refers to expense:groceries
> since I paid the deposit when I bought the drinks.  The two dollars cash
> goes in my pocket not the checking account.
> I do the same with my credit card.  I record transactions there in the
> liability:credit card and it refers to the expense i charged.  Gas,
> groceries whatever.
>
> I do on occasion look at expense accounts but usually this is to see
> something specific like how much I spent last week for gas. Generally the
> reports work for that too but I am somewhat challenged by the reports
> options, its me not gnucash.  I tried to do my work in the expense accounts
> but it gets confusing so just work in the asset side since that is where
> the money is anyway.
>
> The mortgage stuff challenges me too but I'm getting better with that.
>
> I have changed things on the fly. Added sub accounts mostly to expenses to
> show more detail when I go back to look it over or run reports.
>
> More simply I use gnucash to see my balances all in one place and up to
> date immediately regardless what has cleared or not cleared the bank.
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> Rich...
> On Jan 2, 2015 9:20 PM, "Patrick Doyle" <wpdster at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Thanks to all who have patiently and gently tried to educate me over
> > the past couple of days.  This has led me to ask myself the very
> > fundamental question, "What do I want my financial management software
> > to do for me?"  And I've realized that I don't really know the answer
> > to that question.
> >
> > So I thought I would turn the question around:
> >
> > How do _you_ use GNUCash to manage your personal finances?
> >
> > Did you write a blog about it?
> > -- Lance Edgar pointed me at these three educational links:
> > http://allmybrain.com/2008/12/15/better-budgeting-with-gnucash/
> > http://allmybrain.com/2009/04/08/gnucash-budget-followup/
> >
> http://allmybrain.com/2011/01/26/simplified-envelope-budgeting-for-gnucash/
> >
> > Did you describe it on this list?
> > -- feel free to point at your post in the archives.
> >
> > If there is enough of a response, I would be happy to summarize the
> > responses on the Wiki.
> >
> > --wpd
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