Why I'm trying GnuCash

[Nelson Handcock]

Welcome to Gnucash.

I've not been on a similar journey - I "do the books" for a not-for-profit
organisation, and our Gnucash file is audited annually for compliance. I'm
an IT nerd not an accountant, but I found Gnucash easy enough to use once I
got comfortable with the basic accounting concepts.

I believe Gnucash is a great alternative to the MYOB/Quicken products -
it's as simple or a complex as you want to make it.

The GN user community certainly is enthusiastic as you say - I've always
been able to get issue resolved quickly.

For what it's worth - I don't think you'll be disappointed with GN at all.



Thanks & Regards,

Nelson Handcock


On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 2:18 AM, Stan Brown <the_stan_brown at fastmail.fm>
wrote:

> Being brand new to the list, I don't know whether it's customary to
> introduce oneself. But how I got here is perhaps a little unusual, and
> might be of interest to some of you.
>
> I started double-entry bookkeeping for my personal accounts on paper in
> the 1970s, using the accrual method not cash basis. Accrual just seemed
> to make more sense to me, given my increasing use of credit cards. And
> it rankled to record property taxes as a huge expense in one month not
> no others, or to record my entire mortgage payment as an expense when
> much of it was a debt repayment. And of course we've all got receivables
> as we wait for reimbursement for employer business expenses or for
> medical expenses covered by insurance.
>
> Since 1984, I've been using a dBase III/IV program that I wrote myself.
> It isn't very flexible, of course, and in particular getting a decent
> cash flow statement continues to elude me. But I've got it set up to
> warn of incomplete transactions when I try to commit them, and it does a
> nice job of closing the books and reconciling cash at the end of every
> month.
>
> The big motivation for a change was getting my affairs in order as I
> near retirement. My executor, or my attorney-in-fact if I have the
> misfortune to become incapacitated, is not going to be able to get dBase
> IV easily, or to run it on a Mac in any case. (It won't even run in
> 64-bit Windows command line; I had to install DosBox to run it.)
>
> I started writing a VBA system in Excel. Excel still can import dBase
> data files, which helps quite a lot. And it's faster for data entry,
> given auto-complete. But keeping all transactions balanced proved harder
> than I expected, and writing all custom reports just looked like too
> much effort. And I'm not sure how long VBA will continue to be supported
> -- Web-based Excel already excludes it. The annual subscription fee for
> Quickbooks and Quicken makes them non-starters, in my opinion.
>
> GnuCache is not well known, but it's easy to find, well reviewed, and
> followed by an enthusiastic user base. And the promised flexibility was
> very attractive, though I'm not yet to the point of taking advantage of
> it. I'm also hoping to take advantage of the automatic update of
> mutual-fund values, though it will be a while till I can look into that.
>
> --
> Regards,
> Stan Brown
> Tompkins County, New York, USA
> http://BrownMath.com
> http://OakRoadSystems.com
>
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