[ytjohn]

As an update, I decided to try GnuCash out and enter the last months. It's really nice. The first month is going to take you the longest. But entering these really gets you thinking about where your money goes.

For someone starting out, don't go crazy adding empty accounts. Start with a small set of account like the check register or "common accounts" that have a checkings, savings, and maybe a few expenses. Start transcribing from your main or most active checking account. As you enter, you'll see and "Imbalance-USD" account get created automatically in your "transfer" column. What I found useful is to do a few of these, then switch to the accounts tab and create an account for it. Expenses like "Household", and then you can create somethng below that like Utilities. You can put all your Internet and Electricity expenses under that, of if you desire, go ahead and make sub-accounts like "Expenses:Household:Utilities:Internet". Or drop the "utilities" category altogether and embrace a more flat sty "Expenses:Internet". You can later reorganize/rename these however you want.

But once you get the first month in, you have most of your categories setup. If you start on a second month and get something new, you can let it in imbalance and come back to it a bit later. I love the autocompletion and easy account filtering/search/selection in-line.

I don't know if I do enough nowadays to really need this, but if I did, it's definitely pretty easy to work with.

[landmass]

I agree with the concept of starting small - I didn't. I have various accounts in various banks and now have 26 accounts that need to be balanced, all in order to have live "net worth" visibility. At first I enjoyed doing it to that level, but not anymore. I need to prune the accounts I enter using .csv and just keep track of current accounts, like checking accounts.

That said, GnuCash is definitely worth the effort - GnuCash has continued while some "easier" financial programs have not. I thought about using it after MicroSoft abandoned MS Money with 10 years of my financial data. I looked at GnuCash but it looked too hard and I migrated to MyMoney instead, but after a few years it dropped support. I again looked at GnuCash but again chose not to face learning the "harder" GnuCash and migrated to MoneyDance; after a few years they changed its default to "Save on exit," rather than allowing me to exit to abandon mistakes and start over. This time I migrated to GnuCash in the hope that it will be longer-lived.

I don't know that I need to have all my financial data for 25 years, but if I'd chosen GnuCash from the start I'd still have it. It turns out that the other systems were not easier, if you include having to re-learn so many financial systems and incompletely migrate existing data.

[nickjj]

Yeah that's a good way to go about it. If you relate it back to programming, creating accounts are like abstractions. You wouldn't really start off with a bunch of perfectly named accounts until you get a feel for what you're working with.

I started the same way and over time refined them. GnuCash lets you move previous transactions between accounts as needed.