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GnuCash 2.0.0 Released
tashanna writes "After a very welcome GTK2 conversion and some additional feature hacking, GnuCash has released version 2.0.0. Other notable changes include: 'OFX DirectConnect which can directly retrieve and import account statements over the Internet, a "Hide account" feature to keep a better overview of your current accounts tabbed window functionality, the ability to create budgets within GnuCash using your account data, support for Accounting Periods, the data file format has been improved with respect to international characters data files with international characters can be transferred to other countries flawlessly, GnuCash Help and Guide are now fully integrated with the GNOME Help system (Yelp).'"
I'd like to try this out. GnuCash seems like a good foundation for keeping track of finances, but past versions haven't been user friendly enough for non-accountants like myself.
With the adaptation to GTK2 , GNUcash may someday be available for Microsoft Windows according to the GNUcash wiki at http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Windows/
With GTK1, a port of GNUcash for Windows was only a dream.
GnuCash is pretty popular in the Linux world. It would be great to see this OSS project available to Windows users as well.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Gnumeric (spreadsheets), Abiword (word processing) and GnuCash (financing) are all excellent programs that the Gnome project collectively call Gnome Office. Anyone know if this is co-operative in any manner? ..good 'competition' to Open Office, even if they are not in the same class. It'd be great if these apps had a certain level of integration, although I can't think in what way off the top of my head.
My major qualm with accounting apps has been the American slant they have. It's often trivial stuff, like the terminology, but some things are slightly different 'over here', and having played with a few other free and Open Source apps, I often found myself a little bit lost and confused. I've used Quicken for some time, and it does what I want, and doesn't confuse me, but it's been localised more I think. I can't pin down the exact things I wasn't happy with, but I know in the past I felt too much of a US-bias.
just my limited experience here...
.qif type format and import into gnucash just fine. then you have control over your payroll... my biggest reasons for switching from quickbooks: 1. tired of forced upgrades when the software already did more than I wanted and 2. (the real killer) if you don't use their subscription payroll system, then the payroll calculations will be WRONG. I had some local payroll taxes implemented in my quickbooks. When I got tired of paying them for tax tables that I could get for free from the govt, I let that subscription lapse and guess what happened... the payroll deductions calculated by those taxes I had setup were suddenly wrong. Hours of research later, i determined that without the subscription, it dropped a couple points of precision on the other, custom numbers it was computing. WTF! so screw intuit. IMHO.
depending on what you're doing, gnucash IS a good replacement for quickbooks. It handles a/p. a/r and a reasonable slew of business reports. It does NOT do payroll, which may be a killer for a lot of people, but in my experience, quickbooks payroll wasn't all that. Once you've built a decent spreadsheet for doing payroll, you can format it into a
man, I feel like mold.
For a really excellent, lightweight, and easy-to-use alternative to Quicken, GnuCash, MoneyDance, et al, I can heartily recommend Ledger. It kicks!!
It's a command-line program that implements double-entry accounting, without the clunky GUI/WIMPy frills.
I don't know if anyone from the GnuCash dev comunity reads this, but for what it's worth here's my big problem to trying it or any OpenSource finance package.
Even if these things start to be able to hold a candle to MS Money, there are lots of people (like me) who have years and years worth of data in Microsoft or Quicken. Unless we can port the data, we probably won't really give these things a proper try.
I would imagine that this is HARD to do. At least based on the fact that Quicken tried to make a program to make the porting easier but it sucked (it failed to match up transactions properly - ie that the -500 that left my checking account is the same +500 that arrived in my brokerage)
In my opinion, most people who would use these tools, are the kind of people who were using Quicken or MSM before GnuCash came along. To get us to switch, we need to be able to port our data in a simple and robust way.
just a thoight...
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