GnuCash

I&#x27;m an avid user of GnuCash. Last I checked, their mobile app was basically abandoned (around 2018), and it had no way to use a SQL DB, even though the desktop can use SQLite3, MySQL, and Postgres [1]. So there was no easy way to use desktop AND mobile in a shared way.<p>So, I made a small companion app called gnucash-helper [2]. It&#x27;s a Python&#x2F;Flask web app for doing the very basics of GnuCash, i.e. entering transactions, looking at their history, and checking balances.<p>If you want to try it out, there&#x27;s a demo of it on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;demo.checkyour.finance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;demo.checkyour.finance</a>. The container it runs in is destroyed every 30 minutes, but that&#x27;s enough time to play with it. It&#x27;s very simple, but it does everything I need, to the point that I no longer have to open the desktop program.<p>Your feedback is most welcome. I should say right now, though: it&#x27;s more like beta software at this point. I haven&#x27;t built the Docker container in a while, so the one on Docker Hub may or may not work. If anyone has any interest in contributing ideas or code to this, I would love to hear about it.<p>Edit:<p>A couple things I forgot to mention:<p>- The backend for this is a .gnucash file that is saved in the sqlite file format. You can add your own into an S3 bucket, and this will write to it using Python&#x27;s boto3 library.<p>- There&#x27;s no way as of yet to download the GnuCash file directly from the web app, but I would like to add that in the future.<p>- The heart of this app is the Piecash Python library [3]. It lets you use Python to alter GnuCash files.<p>References:<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnucash.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;v4&#x2F;C&#x2F;gnucash-guide&#x2F;basics-files1.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnucash.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;v4&#x2F;C&#x2F;gnucash-guide&#x2F;basics-files...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;bxbrenden&#x2F;GnuCash-Helper" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;bxbrenden&#x2F;GnuCash-Helper</a><p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sdementen&#x2F;piecash" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sdementen&#x2F;piecash</a>

Without a way to easily import data directly from my banks&#x2F;credit cards, using GnuCash (or Firefly III, a great alternative that&#x27;s also worth checking out) just takes way more time than its worth. (OFX was not as straightforward to obtain or use as one would hope). Mint is so much easier to use - it automatically pulls and categorizes transactions from pretty much any institution imaginable without no user effort needed. I stopped using Mint after a brief stint because of data privacy and security. No matter how many security claims they made, I just couldn&#x27;t justify giving them my bank passwords in plain text. I suppose it doesn&#x27;t matter as much for credit cards, but for my checking&#x2F;savings accounts, a compromise would actually jeopardize my money. Apparently some of the big US banks are starting to roll out authentication APIs (e.g OAUTH) so it may be worth another look.<p>It does seem like there&#x27;s still room for a FOSS&#x2F;selfhosted Mint clone that gracefully and automatically handles data import (I wouldn&#x27;t even mind having to enter my banking passwords each time I want to update, to avoid storing them)

Related:<p><i>GnuCash 4.7</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28666104" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28666104</a> - Sept 2021 (11 comments)<p><i>Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23237445" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23237445</a> - May 2020 (319 comments)<p><i>GnuCash: Open-source double-entry accounting software</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20109545" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20109545</a> - June 2019 (100 comments)<p><i>Using GnuCash as a Freelancer to Track Finances and Prepare Taxes</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16857884" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16857884</a> - April 2018 (184 comments)

I once wrote about using GnuCash as a freelance solo developer at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nickjanetakis.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;using-gnucash-as-a-freelancer-to-track-finances-and-prepare-taxes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nickjanetakis.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;using-gnucash-as-a-freelancer...</a>.<p>I started using it in 2017 and still use it today. It&#x27;s still really solid and makes filing quarterly taxes not too painful. In my opinion it&#x27;s one of the best tools out there if you like your privacy and don&#x27;t want to link your bank accounts to a third party service.

For those of you who like the idea of GNUCash but are looking for an easier tool to use (for us developer folks), check out <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plaintextaccounting.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plaintextaccounting.com</a>.

I&#x27;ve used GnuCash for 13 years now, for personal finances and two companies, and love it to death. There&#x27;s something really satisfying when you see everything balance!<p>The only issues I&#x27;ve had over all these years have been banks&#x2F;credit cards that have weird idiosyncrasies in their file formats (lookin&#x27; at you, AmEx) that require you to remove the trailing white space (bad memory, I have a text file that reminds me what to do every time) or whatever and getting stock updates (gnc-fq-update) working again after upgrade.<p>It&#x27;s also really accessible. While slow and a little annoying, I can do almost everything with a keyboard instead of the mouse (unlike so much online tax software, which is a carpal tunnel specialist&#x27;s <i>dream</i>).

If you are looking for a modern free desktop accounting platform check out FrappeBooks - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;frappe&#x2F;books" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;frappe&#x2F;books</a>. Version 1.0 is round the corner.

Does anyone have a good workflow for recording personal finances with this type of tool? My problem is that recording every single transaction becomes tedious, so I end up not doing it and the ledger gets out of sync, making it even more tedious to catch back up in a vicious cycle. I&#x27;m considering not tracking individual payments and instead just the total monthly changes so I at least have an up-to-date net worth calculation

I&#x27;m surprised to see a GNU project that not only hosts their code on GitHub, but also has an official Facebook community. What gives?

With two busy working (and shopping) adults, a teenager, and a little kid, online shopping, cash, cards, etc, I think I would need to hire a data entry clerk to use something like this.

The GnuCash documentation is high quality and an excellent introduction to double entry accounting, with lots of great examples for e.g. stock sales.

GnuCash only imports ancient quicken formats. The new Quicken formats (since about 2015) are not importable. I&#x27;d love to, but I can&#x27;t restart a 32-year quicken file, so they got me. Plus I think the UI for GnuCash isn&#x27;t as smooth as quicken (w.r.t. categories and accounts, they all blend together in a weird way, IMHO).

Obligatory HN comment about the mobile site being bad:<p>It&#x27;s almost impressive how bad it is on my phone.<p>The content takes up 2&#x2F;3 of the page horizontally to make room for the logo on the side.<p>I get GNU and it&#x27;s culture are less about mobile and more about *nixy desktops&#x2F;laptops&#x2F;servers, but it takes more effort to break things like this than letting the browser do it&#x27;s natural thing most of the time.

GnuCash can be a lot of work, but I&#x27;ve found worthwhile ways to use it. YMMV.<p>I used GnuCash when I had a consulting business (including abusing the invoicing features for time-tracking), as well as for personal finances.<p>Over the years, I keep experimenting with different ways to use it.<p>At one point, I could even run a custom report to show how much I was saving by making coffee at home rather than picking up one each day.<p>Eventually I kept simplifying, especially in Expense accounts, eventually only distinguishing transaction categories by tax implications.<p>I also stopped recording each individual little cash transaction. Instead, I occasionally counted the cash in my wallet, and added an &quot;Expenses:Misc.&quot; transaction to make it match what GnuCash thought (given ATM withdrawals the bank import showed).<p>I never did figure out a practical way to track Guideline.com 401(k) in GnuCash, and, the instant I could close the account, I rolled it over to Fidelity. Where tracking the prices and every dividend reinvestment of my ITOT and AGG was easy and almost fun.<p>I&#x27;m currently taking a break from GnuCash for 2022, seeing whether a fancy assets&amp;liabilities spreadsheet in Libre Office would be better. (While still saving the monthly OFX&#x2F;QFX exports from my financial accounts, while I can, in case I ever need them.)<p>Initially, the spreadsheet seemed to do what I want with less effort, but I&#x27;m finding that GnuCash might actually be less effort in practice for the level of up-to-date and historical charting that I have.

Recently I was asked about something to manage a basic income&#x2F;outcome finances for a small bar.<p>The lack of a basic &quot;cash in the register in the morning&quot;, i.e. a basic ability to input the transactions in the different times of day (despite the backend supports it) was an instant no go for the task.<p>I used GnuCash for a couple of years to track the finances of my family, but the inability to place the transactions by the <i>time</i> is a thing which drived me to totally abandon the thing.

I&#x27;m aware of the benefits of double entry bookkeeping, and tried to use GNUCash for a while.<p>The fact that it doesn&#x27;t have an official companion smartphone app (that I&#x27;m aware of) was the dealbreaker; I can go for weeks without touching my personal computer.<p>Ultimately I&#x27;ve resorted to Google Sheets with a lot of formulae and data validation; I can now see all my incomes and expenses, the summary of all my accounts, expenses across different categories etc. I&#x27;ve been on this for a while now and it&#x27;s been great.<p>And Google Sheets sync to my smartphone as well. (I periodically manually backup all the important stuff separately, just in case Google blocks me).<p>Also I&#x27;m not a huge fan of the UI.<p>Still, I would&#x27;ve used GNUCash if I used my personal computer regularly.

I switched a while ago to MoneyDance which is a very similar paid app. It’s OK. I have a lot of Perl code sitting about for unfucking various bank transaction exports into OFX, and I wonder how people who aren’t programmers manage

I have tried GnuCash in the past. It was too complicated for my needs. All other budgeting software I thought was too complicated and complex for the average person. I use a spreadsheet to handle my budget. I keep it as a reminder that temporary solutions can become permanent. The file name is &quot;planstemp&quot;. It was temporary more about ten years ago. I found using different banks depending on the purpose of the transaction the easiest way to keep track of expenses. I use one bank for regular monthly expenses and another for daily expenses. Regular expenses are predictable. If I was running a business, I keep that separate from personal.

I was an avoid GnuCash user until HSBC (my bank) stopped offering statement downloads in OFX format.<p>I took a glimpse into the chasm of madness of trying to OCR their PDF statements and decided... no.

Does anyone have experience with Skrooge [1], the KDE equivalent of this?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.kde.org&#x2F;skrooge&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.kde.org&#x2F;skrooge&#x2F;</a>

UI text is painfully small and while keyboard-friendly it has too many annoyances

Receipts - for macOS, local database, automated content recognition, document management. Convenient commercial alternative to GnuCash to track expenses and income. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.receipts-app.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.receipts-app.com&#x2F;</a>

How does this compare against Beancount + Fava?

How does this compare with Actual that was open sourced just a couple of days or so ago?<p>I think it&#x27;s easy to make anything better than the super buggy mint.com.

Sidetrack : Wonder can they do gnuCoin, openSourceCoin or even …