New user transitioning from Quicken
Maf. King
maf at chilwell.net
Sun May 1 05:57:29 EDT 2016
On Saturday, 30 April 2016 22:53:35 BST Leo Simon wrote:
> Hi everybody.
>
> Like many users of gnucash, I've been using Linux for years and the only
> reason I keep a windows virtualbox is to have access to quicken. I have
> very much hoped that gnucash would allow me to jettison Windows forever, but
> so far it appears that's sadly not to be an attainable goal.
>
> I've read the section of the manual for transitioning-from-Quicken users
> like me, but amazingly it doesn't address the most basic questions that all
> quicken users must surely want an answer to. The first of these is: how
> to/if it's indeed possible to reproduce the analog of Quicken's check
> registers. The manual has an entire chapter devoted to the transition
> process, but amazingly---and this seems to be a pattern---it doesn't appear
> to anywhere address the simplest of simple questions: can I get the same
> functionality out of gnucash that I get out of Quicken?
>
> The manual seems to suggest that working with Accounts rather than
> Categories will make your life easier, whereas it's abundantly clear that,
> at least for long-time quicken-users, it makes your life *much* harder.
> Specifically, the first thing that I want to be able to do is abstract from
> gnucash's account structure and look at all my transactions in a ledger that
> matches my online ledger with my bank. In other words, I've been unable
> to get "outside" of gnucash's account structure, and see a date-sorted list
> of *all* my transactions, rather than see, individually, all of by
> transactions that belong to a particular Account. To say it in yet a
> different way, I simply want to see a replica of my bank statement within
> gnucash. Presumably, *everybody* who has ever used Quicken must
> desparately want to see the same thing, so it *presumably* must be
> possible.
>
> If anybody could help with this, or point me to the right website for a
> question like this, I'd be very grateful.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Leo
Hi Leo.
First off, let me say that I last used quicken under Windows 3.1 / Win 95, so
I have no idea what modern quicken "looks like", but back in the day I found
GC's user interface to be fairly similar to that of the then (already old)
quicken I was using.
In addition to reading the Quicken -> GC transition docs, have you also looked
at the whole GC tutorial & concepts guide?
I think your main question really relates to being able to see a view of your
bank account - which is most certainly possible.
You should have a gnucash account that corresponds to each of your "real
world" bank accounts (checking, credit card, savings, etc). and at least one
(probably many) expense and income accounts. In truth, I found the expense &
income accounts to be conceptually quite similar to what quicken called
categories
Operationally, I find it easiest to open my bank account (or credit card etc)
register and enter my transactions from there, and specify which expense
account (category) it should be. How detailed you want to track your
expenses dictates the number and grouping of the expense accounts. You may be
content, for example, with a single "Expense" account (that is like a black
hole into which you pour money!) More likely, you'll want things like
Expenses:Car, Expenses:Groceries, Expenses:EatingOut and so on. You may want
to go further with things like Expenses:Car:Fuel, Ex:Car:Servicing,
Ex:Car:Valeting etc.
>From the view of the bank account register, it should closely match the bank's
view of your account with them. It is unlikely to always match perfectly
though, as things like clearance time and proceessing delay will often make
the bank's and your opinion on the account differ a little. That is what the
monthly reconcile is for - to confirm that you and the bank agree up to a
certain point in time.
My advice would be that you don't start with GC by importing your old data
from quicken, but to run both in parallel for a couple of months and get the
feel of GC. Yep, it is more of a chore, but learning by doing isn't usually a
waste of time!
HTH,
Maf.
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