I haven't tried using GnuCash with Sqlite, but I would like to experiment when I get the time. Is it reliable?
I used to be a technical/functional engineer for Oracle EBS, so I dealt with very complex schemas that interlinked with each other especially in the sub-ledgers.
I've always toyed with the idea of adding Revenue Recognition functionality to GnuCash but am too busy to do so. Perhaps after seeing the schema in Sqlite I can take a shot at it.
Cheers
Now, in a perfect world, yes, GNUCash and literally ANYTHING other than Quickbooks would be an option for small business accounting. But we do not live in a perfect world. We live in a world where Intuit has fought VERY hard to make damn sure no one can use anything but Quickbooks, and their iron fist is clad in very specific APIs and file formats.
If you do not use Quickbooks:
* Your bank will hate you.
* Your investors will hate you.
* Your payroll system won't work.
* Your tax systems won't work.
* Your accountant won't work.
* Grants are even off the table in some cases.
* Some places won't audit without Quickbooks.
I constantly run into well intentioned open source zealots who demand the use of GNUCash. This is terrible. Don't be that person.
The world has chosen QuickBooks. This choice was made under duress and with corrupt power brokering. But the decision has been made. Maybe there are some OK SaaS options, but they only exist as long as Intuit allows them to exist. Anything competing with Quickbooks is going to be bought and killed by Intuit, so you're going into a dead-end alley. I know that leaves GNUCash on the table, but...
Please, do not make the mistake my many non-profits and businesses have repeatedly made when I was not paying enough attention to scream bloody murder about it. I turn my back for one minute, and engineers are installing GNUCash on the accountant's Mac Laptop.
It's 100% always come back to bite us in the ass, as we've had to change platforms on-demand in order to meet a funding deadline, a bank requirement, a loan ask, or a grant application. And it's ALWAYS the accountant in the org that gets saddled with the 60+ hour work weeks it takes to redo everything. If I was an acocuntant, I'd quit if told to use GNUCash, but most of them kinda don't know any better because, hey, why not try some thing the techies are all excited about!
GNUCash is a wonderful project. I wish we could all use it. But we cannot. Not for real business. And honestly, this is only for contrived, arbitrary reasons. But these reasons exist. The world is 100% built to prevent people from not using Quickbooks at every turn, and you only harm yourself by demanding open source software for accounting. As I said to the director of my most recent non-profit: "You would not tolerate the accountant coming in here and demanding you use NetBeans. Please, give them the same courtesy you'd expect them to give you on tool choice."
It depends on geography. According to Codat's 2021 report [0] on SME accounting market share:
- In the US, QuickBooks is the clear market leader, with 75.7% combined market share across their three main offerings (QB Online, QB SE and QB Desktop). FreshBooks is in second place at 4.5%, and Wave and Xero equal third at 3.5% each
- In the UK, Sage is the market leader, with a combined market share of 28.8% across their three main UK products (Sage 50/50 Cloud, Sage Accounting, and Sage 200cloud); QuickBooks combined market share (Online+Desktop+SE) is closely behind, in second place at 26.2%; and Xero is in third place at 24%
- In Australia + New Zealand, Xero is in first place at 49.4% market share, MYOB in second place at 33.8%, QuickBooks comes third at 11.2%
- In Canada, QuickBooks is the clear market leader with a combined market share of 68.2%; FreshBooks is in second place at 6.9%; while Sage at 6.4% is in third place. Kashoo comes fourth at 4.3%, and Wave, Xero and Logiciel Actiff are equal fifth at 3.8% each.
So, it is really only in North America that "no one can use anything but Quickbooks" is remotely true – and even there, close to 25% of US SMEs and over 30% of Canadian SMEs are successfully using "something other than Quickbooks".
But I agree it is likely true, that for the vast majority of US small-to-medium businesses, GNUCash is not a realistic alternative to Quickbooks. But what about FreshBooks or Wave or Xero? Or the dozen other commercial accounting software vendors with some presence in the US market?
[0] https://www.codat.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Codat_Global...
Why? Surely all US banks use open, standardized data formats to export financial statements and to execute transactions in bulk? Or are you thinking of another reason?
US banking is a shitshow which is decades European banking, addressing that would benefit everyone.
> Your investors will hate you
Why? Surely your investors are interested in accurate accounting? Can gnucash not generate some kind of report they need? If so, that should be a trivial fix.
> Some places won't audit without Quickbook
That is an impressive shitshow of a situation.
Just kidding of course. Thank you for your post. I had considered using gnu cash many times in this situation and I'm likely to have done it. Luckily someone else handled the accounting portion for the last gig.
I badly want gnu cash to be a thing. I really hate into it. And I want them to fail. I would love if gnu cash is what made them fail. But it sounds like it's going to take a whole lot more than just a few sacrifices like us. We'll just go through misery, and nothing will be affected cuz we'll end up stuck on QuickBooks anyway.
- The price increased every year. We started at about $60/month and after a few years it $80/month. Today the same plan is $99/month.
- The PayPal integration randomly stopped working and was missing transactions. QB customer support was completely useless and we spent hours searching and manually adding transactions. The bank integration (via Plaid) was also not reliable.
- The inventory management is very limited. E.g. you can't repack/combine items without using weird hacks.
So, after a few years I got very frustrated and ended up moving to ERPNext. Migrating all the data was quite a bit of work and involved a number of Python scripts to pull out the data from QB and re-create it in ERPNext, but after about a week we had 5 years of data migrated.
ERPNext is not perfect, but works quite well for us. A big difference to QB is that it supports inventory and manufacturing operations. It also has an API that is fairly easy to use and we use it to get transaction data from PayPal and Stripe.
But the only way to hopefully get to a world where you don’t need Quickbooks anymore is to fight back, not for them. And like you said, Intuit can buy off startups, so this leaves us with free open source systems... like GnuCash.
A lot of other people seem interested, if you have a blog this would be a great post.
And yet knowing this has gone on, you refuse to continue to fight the good fight even still? Sounds like you're part of the problem my man.
I'm so fucking tired of corporate apologists/appeasers.
If you need to record whole shop visit as one transaction (like "Food at Lidl") it is tolerable, but as soon as you want to enter each line in your receipt as separate part of split transaction (like, food:milk = 2 euro, food:bread = 1 euro, food:eggs = 3 euro, food:meat:pork = 8 euro, etc) you need to type everything again and again without good suggestions, based on your previous history. Such suggestions could be very sophisticated, taking counterpart and other parameters and suggest "food:bread" and price by letters "br" if counterpart is "Lidl" or "clothing:bra" and other price if counterpart is "Victoria Secret", for example, but, alas, nothing I've tried, support this.
Really, old (PalmOS 3.0!) Pocket Money was a breeze, and everything else, Desktop or Mobile, is much, much worse in this aspect.
Also, I think, that when you have all you transactions vrty detailed, it is better to have nested "categories" and not nested "accounts". It is almost cosmetic difference, but it is strange for me to have "cache" and "food:meat:pork" as same type of objects. I don't transfer money to "food:meat:pork", I spend money for it. I transfer money to the shop, not to the product! As far as I know, professional accounting systems doesn't have account for each asset of the firm, like different accounts for monitors, laptops, computers and (computer) mices.
Maybe, I don't find it yet? Any suggestions?
With that said, I learned quite a bit as a result of that level of granularity. When all expenses at Amazon, Walmart, etc go into the same bucket, it's really difficult to truly understand what you're spending your money on and if you have a problem you need to curb. Seeing "$X in spending at Amazon" isn't really that useful without knowing how important or frivolous any of those expenses were.
In any case, unless tracking gets super easy, with digital receipts saved directly onto our mobile devices and standardized for processing, I just couldn’t be bothered to break down paper receipts.
That BTW makes me wonder why have we not seen e-receipts standardized yet. We can pay wirelessly with devices, so why not save some more meta data about the transaction, including the receipt itself? Seems like a low hanging fruit, also saving tons of paper.
A lot of banking apps these days will automatically categorize your spending as well which eliminated much of the need to manually enter it in to a different app.
If you plan ahead you know how much money you actually have and can plan better.
I find I save way more with a proper budget in place.
In terms of the detail, I used to do very detailed breakdowns of categories, but now I don't really see the point: my app supports 'split transactions' (one of the reasons I actually made it, as existing solutions had poor support for them back in 2009), and I generally just use things like 'Food', 'Drinks', 'Essentials' as categories, as it never really made sense (at least for me) to detail them with such accuracy.
But for things like 'coffee', I do 'Drinks:Coffee', so I can see how much I am spending on fairly specific things, but I guess it's a balance in terms of whether it's worth the effort to record them so accurately compared to making use of the details.
Similarly, things like 'Car:Fuel', 'Car:Service', etc...
For fraud, I think it's basically a matter of whether we can recognize each transaction. You don't actually need to download transactions for that; you can just skim your monthly statements.
For saving, that's tricky because there needs to be that recognition of what categories are likely to increase during retirement versus decrease. I gave that a single pass a while back, and now I have a count each month of those expense categories that will continue into retirement, along with a 12-month average, so I can get a sense of what my portfolio needs to be able to fund after I retire. For that, even though I have Banktivity, I also have to use a spreadsheet.
For taxes, I don't know if anything really makes that easy. It's hard to know what category breakdown you really need to know whether you're capturing all your tax benefit, and my financial software doesn't tell me "oh, by the way, you'll want to split that transaction since some of it has a tax benefit."
I ended up making my own app https://github.com/VMelnalksnis/Gnomeshade. I also felt similarly regarding accounts, so I split transactions into two parts - transfers and purchases. That allows to handle multiple currencies, and handle categorization separately from accounts. I haven't looked into suggestions like you mentioned, I went with trying to parse receipts for my most common purchases.
I couldn't quite understand what you need, but I use KMyMoney (migrated from GnuCash over a decade ago). If you've gone to Walmart and itemized in the past, then the next time you go to Walmart and import your CC statement, it will pick the last Walmart transaction with a similar total charge as your starting point. It's mildly helpful.
And yes, it does do Categories instead of Accounts. The latter, however, is more in line with accounting principles.
It would be nice if there was a QRcode format on receipts for this. Off the top of my head, the encoded format would have:
* store name/location
* total amount
* field for tax(es) broken out
* a general category of the purchase if it's simple ("fuel", "food" for receipt from McDonald's)
* groupings of items for certain types/categories: at (e.g.) Costco you can buy groceries and clothing, so have a grouping for all your food with the total for that categorized as "food", clothes grouped together with its category; you can also get gas and tire/oil changes ("transportation")
The major categories could be what a lot of countries use for CPI categories:
* https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/2018016/cpi-ipc...
* https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.t01.htm
* https://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/cpi/158c.html
* https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/macroeconomic_and_sectoral/h...
Not something I've looked at and specific to Lidl but if you shop there regularly it might be worth trying.
You might be able to use one of the open weight models instead. (Maybe one of the apache 2.0 qwen’s?) Scan a batch, then hand check the results in fifo order. That way you can probably get away with a local gpu.
The hard part will be getting structured output that gnucash likes. I’d try a simple json schema (stick the schema and some example input/output in the context), and then write some code to convert it to a format gnu cash can import.
Due to a colossal screw up my bank had after I moved back to my home country, it took me several months to get a new debit card. So I got used to just taking out X cash per month, and dividing it.
I’ve tried a few financial tracking things since getting back on the card wagon, and found none of them actually have the same result (spending less) as just dividing cash into physical buckets.
A given item and a given transaction could have any number of different properties, and no single heirachical category can express the reality.
Is it a work expense or is paid through paypal or is it a subscription or is it from amazon or is it food? A single item could be all of those at once, and sometimes when you want to know "all food" you want to include that regardless what it's other properties are.
IE, pork doesn't really have to be under some heirarchy like meat. It is both pork and meat, and it also may be art supplies or photographic subject etc.
But GNUCash existed when I first got a job decades ago.
GNUCash exists today.
I don't think any other package really matches the endurance.
It is absolutely frustrating because it has that mid 90s utility design.
I don't think I have seen any other utility hasnt really progressed on interface design like GNUcash. Like they built a prototype went "Nailed it!" And then moved onto back end stuff while ignoring all input from users.
Make it work well and then stop fiddling with it.
This is hugely valuable. I've been using gnucash since the late 90s, and have the all data files going back to 2000.
As for myself, I agree that the XML format is not great, but I use the SQLite format, which allows me to write scripts on it.
If nothing else works, a Gnucash file is XML. A bit annoying to work with, but quite possible.
[0] based on https://gist.github.com/nonducor/ddc97e787810d52d067206a592a...
Whenever I have to edit an xml file I tend to just go ham with python's xml library. the scripts are never pretty, mainly because they are whatever addhoc editing I wanted in written form. The hardest part is figuring out the xpath syntax.
A slight lie, I use lxml, mainly because it can select siblings which the built in xml lib is unable to do. but I still use the internal libs documentation, mainly because it is easier to read.
It's good software! I eventually wrote code that dynamically links with the libgnucash library so I can auto-generate monthly invoices for the member's dues.
It's kinda a mess tbh, and it actually also requires some non-exposed symbols to work properly, so it needs access to the GnuCash source code. I wouldn't recommend doing this unless you're ok with maintaining your own unsupported GnuCash feature.
The deal breaker for me was the underlying XML or SQLite formats of GnuCash. These are not terribly amenable to scripting, either for ingesting raw data or reporting. Whereas this is basically the point of plain-text tools like Beancount or HLedger. GnuCash feels too much like a walled-garden compared to plain-text tools.
The plain-text format requires more work at first, but after you get the hang of it (and provided you have some background in scripting software) it is awesome.
Databases on the other hand are built for this. After years of dissatisfaction with plain text accounting and many hours spent trying to improve it, I now use SQLite and it has been an enormous improvement.
For me, I found that the SQLite models of GnuCash aren't straightforward to query. That's why Beancount created its own query language. Martin Blais has a good discussion of why a traditional database doesn't quite fit for many accounting purposes https://beancount.github.io/docs/beancount_query_language.ht...
Plaintext is nice for git but I only feel that when fixup-ing a single or small number of transactions. It does feel nice to be have all the details of a transaction in one place in a visually useful way. For one-off hacking and such it definitely feels easier to write O(n^4) python looping over trying to describe things with SQL and working at a scale where it doesn’t matter.
Plaintext as a UI into a SQL store seems an interesting project. I would love a git integration for committing changes after diff review and being able to stage individual txns or parts. Many years ago I was frustrated with ledger’s more loosey goosey syntax and trying these things and eventually gave up whatever the idea was at the time. I like the idea of a constant bidrectional sql<->plaintext that provides a requirement for reproducible parsing and serializing
> parsing it in a structured way is a nightmare
Ah, well that’s the job of the PTA app - converting “just text” to something very structured and validated. Which can then be moved into SQLite, if one likes.
> and scripting edits to plain text is a mess.
I suppose it depends. There are a lot of very powerful and quick tools and techniques for automated or assisted text munging.
That gives me the benefits of Fava and all the other PTA tools as well.
... if SQLite isn't sufficient it also supports SQL backends? I've been running it that way for like a decade.
It's not tailored for our economy and our revenue services.
Here in Sweden if your revenue is below 3 million SEK/year, then you can use "simplified bookkeeping" (rough translation of "förenklat årsbokslut").
In practice it means I could write a very basic program to manage my expenses and income and just have it generate all the necessary numbers that I then enter manually into our revenue service's online app every year.
For simplified bookkeeping GnuCash, and most generalized bookkeeping programs, is overkill.
I accomplish the same thing with 250 lines of Python, and the result is that I get exactly the numbers I need to enter into Skatteverkets e-tjänst, and nothing else. And each transaction is one yaml file, and stored off-site with git.
Do you know of such an option, or even multiple options that can be sensibly used together to achieve this?
At this point, given how many “access your transaction data” companies choose not to cross the US-EU bridge in a way that’s viable for direct personal use, I have to think there’s some reason around incompatible bureaucracy or similar. Or maybe not enough people have international enough lives to want it.
I have a few (comparatively minor) complaints about GnuCash, but they're around UI. Things like: it would be nice to assign all matching (eg Regen) transactions to a selected account, and stuff like that.
But overall, having something that is A) simple and B) I control fully, beats everything else.
The principles of free software show, I guess.
Everything was recorded correctly, but reports would show wrong numbers.
After migrating from GnuCash to beancount, I realized that some transactions where recorded with invalid currency conversion rates.
As someone who relocated recently, manage money in at least 3 currencies, and have an online business, I can’t handle it. I need everything to be explicit in order to avoid mistakes.
I like GnuCash, but for a business, it doesn't automatically handle sales/consumption tax, or employee payroll withholdings, you'd have to manually make splits in every transaction for that.
(Actually I think you all don't have to keep your consumption tax received in a separate account bc you net it out against purchases, but in the US we have to journal the tax into sales tax payable liabilities account, not revenue).
I believe there are some exceptions, with regulated or specially taxed goods like cigarettes, but there was none of those where I worked so it's mostly speculation
I think it would benefit from some changes in the next major version though - the GL of account is good but requires a lot of work for example to track vendors. If I want to track where I'm buying my groceries I have to create separate account for those, rather than being able to optionally specify vendor.
I’m not sure what it was but I couldn’t get it working for me. Tried HomeBank afterwards and was blown away by how accessible it is in comparison.
I might give another try at GnuCash to track something like business/project expenses but it was rather hard to use for my personal finances.
Vice-versa if you're using KDE instead.
This is for serious finance, not for swiping yolo stonks on Robin Hood.
Responsiveness in particular is “inexcusable” to miss because it’s so easy that it’s practically boilerplate these days, and the lack makes it impossible to read on mobile. Will I be convinced by this update to try GnuCash? We’ll never know, because I can’t read the changelog!
I know I’m a zoomer, but zoomers have money too! A little. Sometimes. And for what it’s worth: I’m pretty sure this is an accounting app, not a finance app ;)
I've been looking for a less data intrusive budgeting app. The other I saw was Firefly III.
I use scheduled transactions for all my fixed expenses, and Gnucash enters them 100 days in advance. I manually enter my income, usually also 3 months in advance. My income is very predictable, but can of course vary a little. I then plan out how much to transfer on payday to my debit card account, my bills account, my savings account, etc. I enter any "random" bills (variable or unexpected expenses) as they show up. This allows me to see, in Gnucash, quite exactly how much money I'll have available at any point in time the next 2-3 months.
I keep every receipt for things I buy during the week, and every Sunday I have a routine. It's become a bit overkill, but I enjoy it. First I scan the receipts with a scanner app on my phone. Then I sync the scans to my computer using Syncthing. Then I enter each transaction and link it to the scanned receipt. My hierarchy of expense accounts are reasonably detailed, I'd say.
I've gone so far as to program useful shortcuts into a numpad, to make this process even easier. So for example, instead of Ctrl-A or whatever is the default for linking a transaction to a file in Gnucash, I have one convenient button on the numpad. Other buttons select different transaction views. For a while I even had a setup where I could RDP to a docker container with Gnucash, so I could use it while at the office. For this I'd also use Syncthing to sync my gnucash data between my desktop and the container.
Is it overkill to scan every grocery receipt and whatnot? Yes. Do I need all this historical data? No, not really. But it's somewhat interesting to scroll 3 years back and look at some random dates to see what I bought and what prices were like. It's also useful for tax purposes. And I'm a bit of a data hoarder ;) (I should add that I don't always keep the receipt - I often pay with Google pay and then if it's just food or coffee or something simple like that I just keep the notification until I can enter the transaction in Gnucash.)
The biggest thing this setup gives me is great peace of mind. I've struggled with anxiety and depression, and I've lived through times where I've had credit card debt and very little income, so money has been a big stressor at times. Now I have a reasonably well paid job in IT and no debt except student loan, so I could probably live well without Gnucash, but it's still a source of mental well-being, even comfort. I enjoy my weekly routine and micro-managing my money. Sometimes I just open Gnucash to look at how well I'm doing financially (not wealthy by any means, but my net worth is at least in the positive). Gnucash was also great for planning how to pay off my credit cards.
How do you link transactions to receipts? The one that's on right-click and "Update Association"? When I tried that, I found it way too cumbersome, I feel like I should be able to just drag-and-drop a file onto a transaction. (I know I can set up keyboard shortcuts to open the dialog, but drag-drop would be so much simpler.)
In an ideal world, when drag-and-dropping a file onto a blank line, gnucash would run tesseract or something and extract the date, amount and summary ... one can dream.
