Replacing Microsoft Money, Part 3: GnuCash

August 26, 2009 by TFB

[Update on Sept. 5, 2009] After evaluating the alternatives, I discovered a way to automatically download the transactions and price quotes and feed them to Money after Microsoft pulls the plug. See follow-up posts Replacing Microsoft Money, Part 5: OFX Scripts and Download Price Quotes to Microsoft Money After Microsoft Pulls the Plug.

This is part 3 in my series for replacing Microsoft Money. I gave my requirements part 1 and I looked at Quicken in part 2. This time I’m looking at GnuCash.

GnuCash is a free, open source application. It works on Linux, Mac, and Windows. I tried the version 2.3.4 on Windows.

I can see GnuCash is designed by people with a solid accounting background. It started in 1997 as X-Accountant. In GnuCash, everything is an account and every transaction is a transfer. That’s how an accountant sees things.

To an accountant, there is no fundamental difference between a checking account and salary. The checking account is a balance sheet account. Salary is an income statement account. But they are both accounts. When you put your paycheck into your checking account, you transfer a balance from salary to the checking account — debit checking account, credit salary.

That’s exactly how it’s represented in GnuCash.

Figure 1: Assets, Liabilities, Income, and Expenses are all Accounts

This flexible approach works great for an accountant, but it can be confusing for others. I would rather refer to accounts with my name as “accounts,” income and expenses as “categories,” and investments in my brokerage account as “securities.”

When it gets to investment, it can be even more confusing. Every stock you buy in a brokerage account is also an “account” with a parent account. You can create child accounts within the brokerage account for whatever tracking purpose: stocks vs. mutual funds, domestic vs. international, large cap vs. small cap, serious investment vs. play money, short-term investments vs. long-term investments, etc.

Figure 2: Accounts nest n-levels deep

If you have a good grasp of double entry accounting concepts, GnuCash is great. The infinite level of nesting lets you create your accounts structure however you like. To a novice, there can be a steep learning curve, until you understand why everything is an account and why every transaction is a transfer between two accounts.

On Windows, GnuCash takes a long time to start because it has to load the gnome libraries. After it starts, it runs pretty fast.

Here’s a summary of what GnuCash can do against my requirements:

Categorize transactions x
Download transactions x
Reconcile account balances x
Track against budget x
Allocate loan payments automatically
Track investments x
Download investment price quotes x
Report Investment portfolio returns
Report net worth over time x

There is no way to set up a loan and have it calculate loan payment principal and interest automatically. GnuCash provides a financial calculator for doing the calculation manually. The user can use the bank’s payment confirmation and enter a split transaction.

I did not see anything that calculates investment returns.

GnuCash also has some business features: customers, vendors, invoices, bills, etc. Because I don’t need these features, I did not test them.

Unless you use the business module, there isn’t a concept of a payee. If you want to see how much you paid AT&T over the last 12 months, you have to run a custom report off the free-text description in the register.

GnuCash can import QIF files. In Microsoft Money, you have to export to a QIF file one account at a time. I didn’t try the import because it’s too tedious with many accounts. It will likely create duplicate entries when there are transfers between accounts in Money. Fixing bad imports can be more time consuming than not importing at all.

If GnuCash were the only application on the market, I would use it. It’s very flexible for a power user. It’s great for a small business. It’s free and open source. Because it’s open source, chances are it will live on. For personal use, however, it’s not as user friendly as I’d like.

I will review Moneydance in my next post.

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Comments

4 Comments on Replacing Microsoft Money, Part 3: GnuCash

  1. Vasile on September 10, 2009 | permalink
     

    Hi!

    I also tried to use Gnucash, but it is extremely unstable for me. It kept crashing at different moments, but especially when importing MS Money data. Maybe it’s something on my computer, but I seriously doubt it since the rest of my apps rarely crash… I’m using the latest “stable” release :-(

  2. nvsoar on October 17, 2009 | permalink
     

    For now I’ve settled on GnuCash as a Money replacement. Money Dance stopped working before I had all the data transferred so that evaluation was incomplete. Another candidate is Ace Money. Your comment?

  3. TFB on October 17, 2009 | permalink
     

    nvsoar – After discovering I can use Money after Microsoft pulls the plug, I stopped looking for alternatives. See follow-up posts linked at the top. Someone says he will give me a copy of Quicken 2010. If that happens, I will give Quicken 2010 one more look.

  4. Duane on January 15, 2010 | permalink
     

    I liked the program. I spent some time getting used to it, but once I had my accounts set up, I was ready to go. I genuinely liked the program.

    I spent about 3 hours converting stuff over and then noticed as I sorted columns values in entries changed AND I would start getting weird dates like “29/12/5678″ for an entry that I know I entered for “12/29/09″.

    Closed out of the program, reopened and had an error “parse file error” and was done. All my time is gone and frankly I cannot seem to find quality support.

    My search continues.

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