Comments on: Replacing Microsoft Money, Part 3: GnuCash

By: Jay

Jay — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 02:25:56 +0000

Duane, the parse error message more likely relates to having installed different versions of Gnucash without uninstalling the older one.

So give it a second chance, uninstall any versions you may have and install the most recent one.

By: Jay

Jay — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 02:19:20 +0000

I disagree with your assessment that Gnucash is complicated. I’ve been using Qucken for over 15 years, but I got tired of having issues with my investment balances being always wrong, sometimes from a few dollars to a couple of thousand dollars. Oh and about the countless data corruption I had over the years and the endless update cycles, having to “pay” full price for each version.

In March 2010 I started to use Gnucash side by side with Quicken 2010. I can tell you that I’m very happy with the program. All my investment accounts balance almostto the penny, something that I could never achieved in the 15+ years of quicken usage. I never had a crash or data corruption yet.

GNUCASH allows you to change the settings to use more the more user friendly “Receive” and “Spend” labels, instead Debit and Credit, which may be confused for some folks out there. I also love the flexibility of being able to create and manipulate my own accounts any way I wish, contrary to Quicken which forces me to use their investment categories and does not allow me to create my own categories for Investment Income, for example.

The only thing GNUCASH lacks, in my opinion, is a better and more user friendly interface. I wish it had more eye candy, but as for the accuracy and flexibility Quicken does not come even close. My suggestion to users out there is: just give Gnucash a couple of months, run it side by side with Quicken and don’t be afraid of learning it. I bet you will love its capabilities.

So December 31st 2010 Quicken will be retired in my household. I mean, will still need to keep it around to read my old data, but nothing else.

By: Duane

Duane — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 12:02:00 +0000

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.

By: TFB

TFB — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 00:28:19 +0000

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.

By: nvsoar

nvsoar — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 19:15:56 +0000

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?

By: Vasile

Vasile — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:57:51 +0000

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