I just installed GnuCash on my PowerBook today (using Fink). So far I’m liking it more than I thought I would. It’s not quite as sexy as Quicken and some things seem a bit harder to do, but there’s also a certain simplicity to it that I like. Quicken, in recent years, seems to get more and more bloated and the interface gets busier and less clean. It seems that Quicken 2000 was actually pretty clean, but then subsequent versions added a nifty feature here or there, but mostly just got bloated while customer satisfaction took a nosedive (the reviews of Quicken on Amazon.com are pretty interesting). I’ve never used Microsoft Money, so I can’t comment on how it compares to that.
An interesting thing that I like about GnuCash is that there’s no separate concept of categories – what were categories in Quicken are simply just accounts in GnuCash, and this seems to be a reasonable simplification.
What I’m not liking as much about GnuCash is that it tends to proliferate a lot of windows, although there’s also a sort of tabbed notebook paradigm, but it doesn’t seem to be used consistently in the app. Also, importing two QIF files from my bank was pretty intuitive but tedious because I had to tell it what accounts to assign to the various transactions, one at a time. Supposedly GnuCash remembers those mappings though, so that should not as labor-intensive next time. I also didn’t see an explicit Budget feature, although I’m hoping that I can do everything I need with the reports, which I’ve only scratched the surface of. And since it’s open-source, there’s a better chance that I can write some scripts to do stuff that I want to do – heck, people may have already written the scripts that I would need. Time will tell…
In general, it looks pretty promising. I might just use it alongside Quicken for a few weeks and see how it goes. I definitely like the idea of using something open-source.
It’s interesting to look at what we’re spending our money on:
Of course since we live in the Bay Area, rent, at 34%, is a rather large proportion of our expenses. And a recently booked vacation is blowing out the Travel expense, at 19%.
Care to share what your expenses look like? Are we whacked or does that look reasonable?