New to GNUCash

David T. sunfish62 at yahoo.com
Tue Apr 5 21:22:06 EDT 2016


Hi John,

Welcome. I don’t see any replies, so, I will step in. Bear in mind that I am simply another user, like you, and my opinions are nothing more or less.

1) As you note, there are outstanding requests for some sort of Cost Center/Orthogonal Categories feature, and that they have not been implemented. Personally, I would not expect that to change any time soon. The developer pool for the project has a large and ambitious set of upgrades in mind, and adding this functionality is not attracting their attention. Your best bet on this front is to either use one of the kludges that various members of the list have offered over the years (usually some sort of parallel account structures), or learn to live without. Or, you could dig into the code and write the feature in for all posterity!

2) There is no menu option for saving a backup zip file, and I don’t expect one would be added, based on my understanding of the developers’ philosophy, viz. that users should implement the best tool for a given problem, and not expect GnuCash to provide a second-rate iteration of an already-existing good tool. (And, since you asked, I expect you will get the usual GnuCash Users List Advice Regarding Backups, so consider yourself ForeWarned). For what it’s worth, GnuCash does compress its data upon saving (this can be changed in the preferences). If you are desperate for some sort of automatic backup, you might look into a simple shell script that invokes GnuCash, and upon exit from GnuCash, zips and copies your datafile to some other location. I imagine that such a script might not prove overly daunting to figure out…

HTH,
David

> On Apr 5, 2016, at 10:02 AM, John Angelico <talldad at kepl.com.au> wrote:
> 
> Hi all, from Melbourne, Australia.
> 
> I'm new here but I have used old Quicken in the past. I have a version I call 2.6.12 built from source a week ago with the help of no 2 son.
> 
> I run it on a Debian release called Jessie but please don't ask me too much more about that.
> 
> I'm a 40-year veteran in SME accounting and software, but mainly with other packages and databases. I mostly use Pastel Partner (now part of the Sage behemoth, but I started with it when it was a simple general ledger bookkeeper as Pink Software's "Turbocash" on one 5.25inch floppy disk).
> 
> For some volunteer tasks a Quicken-like solution is attractive BUT...I am looking for a couple of features.
> 
> 1. Cost Center - referred to in docs in a couple of useful places, but from browsing forums I see that it is a long-standing unfulfilled feature request. Quicken has had it for a long time though...
> 
> Is there any prospect of implementation?
> 
> 2. Backup of files (just a .zip is all I need) from within the File Menu
> 
> Does anyone have any news? Even to tell me that I'm a noob and should ask in some other list.
> 
> Regards,
> John Angelico
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