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by neilv 1515 days ago
GnuCash can be a lot of work, but I've found worthwhile ways to use it. YMMV.

I used GnuCash when I had a consulting business (including abusing the invoicing features for time-tracking), as well as for personal finances.

Over the years, I keep experimenting with different ways to use it.

At one point, I could even run a custom report to show how much I was saving by making coffee at home rather than picking up one each day.

Eventually I kept simplifying, especially in Expense accounts, eventually only distinguishing transaction categories by tax implications.

I also stopped recording each individual little cash transaction. Instead, I occasionally counted the cash in my wallet, and added an "Expenses:Misc." transaction to make it match what GnuCash thought (given ATM withdrawals the bank import showed).

I never did figure out a practical way to track Guideline.com 401(k) in GnuCash, and, the instant I could close the account, I rolled it over to Fidelity. Where tracking the prices and every dividend reinvestment of my ITOT and AGG was easy and almost fun.

I'm currently taking a break from GnuCash for 2022, seeing whether a fancy assets&liabilities spreadsheet in Libre Office would be better. (While still saving the monthly OFX/QFX exports from my financial accounts, while I can, in case I ever need them.)

Initially, the spreadsheet seemed to do what I want with less effort, but I'm finding that GnuCash might actually be less effort in practice for the level of up-to-date and historical charting that I have.

3 comments

I had a similar trajectory. For the past few years I've been using ledger-cli, which is a purely command-line tool for double-entry bookkeeping. It reads a plain text file containing structured transaction entries, and can output various formats, like ledgers, reports, etc. I'm liking the minimalism, it just needs a text editor to maintain the transaction journal.
How do you perform graph reporting and forecasting?
For visualizations, I do two things... (1) use little scripts to generate gnuplot input, (2) convert ledger files to beancount files, and use fava. Both have their place. For forecasting, ledger has some built-in capabilities, although I've never used them.
Nothing sophisticated. I just post-date transactions in the journal and let the tool calculate and show me the running account balance. But it's very customizable in output format. As the other reply said, you can feed its output into any other suitable tools.
As a relatively new GnuCash user id love to hear how you made that coffee report. I'm struggling to customize reports right now so I'm really curious how you'd do something like that.

Also for Fidelity I've been struggling to track all the dividend and various random automatic transactions that happen (incl. ESPP, Stock Awards, etc). How do you manage that so it feels easy? I'm sure I'm just missing the right way to import or something. Id love to learn

I used to use HomeBank (http://homebank.free.fr), now just a LibreOffice spreadsheet. I think for personal finances, it's perfectly fine to just record monthly total expenses as a bulk sum, for each account. Unless 'something's off' (i.e. my family has spent too little or too much) it's okay to not know all the expense items.