GNUCash value proposition

[David Reiser]

> On Apr 24, 2017, at 11:31 AM, Steve Cohen <stevecoh2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> ...
> But as I began thinking about ways to move from Quicken to GNUCash, the
> following obstacle is holding me back:
> https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/OFX_Direct_Connect_Bank_Settings#Chase It
> will apparently cost me $9.95 a month just to be able to automatically
> download my transaction data from Chase Bank, which is more than Quicken
> would cost me if I upgraded every year (which I don't).  Possibly plus
> connection fees to the other financial instituations, (brokerages,
> pension accounts, etc.) that I now connect to via Quicken.
> 
> So my question is, and please don't take this as a hostile question, is
> whether it is correct that in making the jump from Quicken I will have
> to pay the banks these high connection fees to use OFX?   If it is, I
> might just opt to stick with Quicken, which I'm not crazy about. Or am I
> missing something?  While there is documentation that is as recent as
> this year, there are also documents dated 2006 or 2008, so I'm not clear
> about the prospects and viability of this project.
> 
> What do GNUCash users do?  Pay the ten bucks a month?  Give up on OFX
> and automatic downloading, or download data from the banks' websites and
> manually import into GNUCash?  Or something else?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Steve Cohen

If you are already downloading transactions from a Chase checking or savings account with Quicken, and are not already paying $9.95/month, then you won’t be paying it with gnucash, either. You’d use the same login credentials you already gave Quicken. Chase bills for access, not for the particular program that is accessing the data. You would, however, have to go through the two- or three-step process to confirm to Chase that gnucash’s attempt to login was legitimate.

I only have credit card accounts with Chase, and those are not charged for DirectConnect downloads. There are published levels of ‘personal banking’ relationships for which Chase allows DirectConnect data downloads without additional charge, but the fees for those levels are excessive in my book. If you’ve had the account for long enough, you might be grandfathered out of DirectConnect fees. Or if you were/are persuasive enough with customer service, that might get the fee waived, too.

One thing you would not get with gnucash via ofx is initiating payments to anyone from within gnucash. That part of DirectConnect has never been attempted in the gnucash realm — too expensive to validate the code, since Quicken and a few banks with custom code are the only organizations that could make access to a test server possible. And they aren’t so inclined at a fee any open source project could stand (and maybe not any price at all for open source code).

Dave
--
Dave Reiser
dbreiser at icloud.com