I’ve read some recent posts about how cool gnucash is, and decided to give it a try. This is the second time I try to use it, hopefully this time I’ll stick with it.
My first experience was “interesting but too buggy”. That was probably a good 2 years ago. Ever since, it has come along nicely. Last night it did not crash on me, not even once. It handled both *.qif and *.qfx files, I used the files downloaded from my accounts (bank). I know I’m not supposed to do that, normally one would keep records of the expenses and would reconcile against the statement – downloading the transaction from the bank will not make sure the bank hasn’t mistakenly messed something up. But I needed some data.
Once I had the data imported, I started to assign it to various gnucash “accounts”, and I got hooked when I saw how easy it is to see how much you paid the cable company etc.
Although it got to be pretty late in the night, I decided to give scheduled transactions a try too – that was one of my biggest worries with gnucash. I used to keep my finances in a gnumeric spreadsheet (I did converted it to .xls at some point so I can read it with OpenOffice if I had too – even though gnumeric is supposed to handle the Open Document Format too). Every month I would copy the block of transactions from the previous month, manually change the dates, keep only the transactions I knew about etc. As it turns out, gnucash will do the scheduling for you automatically (you do have to choose between having the transactions created automatically for you some number of days in advance or be prompted when such a transaction is created).
Around 2AM I finally decided to go to bed, after being pleasantly surprised and very committed to switch away from the spreadsheet.
Whether I will really input all the receipts in the system and reconcile with the credit card statement or just mark the payments from the checking account into the liabilities/credit card account, that’s to be determined – I think it would make sense to spend the effort of tracking down the receipts, I’d be curious to know how many errors the banks made in my credit card statements. If you think it’s not possible, think again: it happened twice so far to have a check debited by the bank with $5 or $10 extra, even if the other side got the proper amount. I caught those errors because they were in my checking account, but I am not that rigorous with my credit cards – if I recognized the transaction it was good enough for me, I wasn’t checking the amount very carefully at all.
