We’ve been Quicken users for quite awhile now. However, under the premise that there isn’t that much new under the sun in the world of personal accounting, we haven’t updated our version for about 5 years now. To compound my particular situation, I had fallen behind on the bookeeping by about 3 months. I’ve made up for more time before; but, frankly, I wasn’t in the mood to make it up.
Unfortunately, the version of Quicken we had did not support OFX direct connect. So we looked at getting Quicken 2010- probably the Deluxe version because it supported budgeting as opposed to the baseline version. I took a look at the price tag and wondered what the state of Gnucash was.
I’ve had prior experience with Gnucash through Linux. But being a dual OS family ultimately required me to part ways with it in favor of Quicken. It (Gnucash) is good software- if lacking in the UI slickness factor. Certainly good enough for personal use and our current requirements. Much to my delight, there’s a Windoze version of it available. And it supports OFX direct connect!
I downloaded and installed it. The UI hasn’t changed since I first used it. All the fucntionality I remembered was still available on this version (2.2.9) of it. I went about setting up all of the accounts and started entering some of the initial transactions for the accounts with lighter activity. One thing I’d never noticed in previous usage, but noticed immediately this time because of my extended use of Quicken, was the double-entry requirement. With Quicken, double-entry really only is apparent when creating a split transaction. In Gnucash, basically every transaction is entered in the same fashion as that.
In brief, the double-entry requirement is quite literal. When writing a check, the amount is entered once in the checking account and then a second time against the expense account (or liability, whatever) to balance the transaction. Compare this with Quicken, where the number is entered once, a category assigned and it’s done. This annoyance is mitigated by transaction memorization to some degree. Still, when entering by hand there’s extra clicking, entering, tabbing stuff to do. But with OFX direct connect, it’s almost a non-issue.
Getting back to setup, the hard part was the OFX configuration. In all honesty, this is where a little UI engineering could be used. The process screams DESIGNED BY GEEK. It’s not unusable but certainly not for the faint of heart. After some googling to turn up special codes and URL’s, I got it to the point that it was connecting but couldn’t download because it was not enabled on the bank’s end. I had to call Bank of America to get that straightened out.
No monthly fee either! Unfortunately, I had to wait 24 hours before trying it because there was a possibility of some kind of error that was difficult to clear.
When I did finally get my chance, it brought 3 months worth of transactions in without a hitch. All I had to do was match them up with accounts. Further, there’s a Bayesian matching algorithm so that, after bringing a large enough corpus in, Gnucash can pretty accurately match up transactions with accounts. The other nicety is that it won’t create duplicate entries if a transaction has previously been entered by hand. All in all, not too shabby.
What else?
It supports investment tracking and has a myriad of reports to choose from so that you can see how money moves in your world. One thing I like is the main tree view- though I’m sure others will disagree. It’s nice because I can very quickly drill down to any account, say “Dining”, and see what the damage looks like there. In Quicken, the user has to run reports to pull that info out.
Many of the other niceties are present- account reconciliation(made even easier using OFX), QIF support for file importing, check printing, online quote retrieval for investments, budget tracking, check printing. There’s even support for small business with payroll, AR, AP and inventory functionality.
So how’s it compare with Quicken? Mostly, I think it’s a matter of style versus substance. Gnucash is nice because it lays everything out in plain view. All accounts are visible and under the your complete control. If you can figure out how to balance two sides of a transaction then you can make Gnucash work for you. I actually think it makes true accounting deceptively simple. Where it lacks is the slickness factor of the UI. The double-entry is manageable but tedious. There are minor glitches in the register views when scrolling with the mouse. Druids (as opposed to wizards) are available to aid initial account setup to get up and running quicker, but ultimately manual tweaking will be needed.
So if you’re looking at upgrading Quicken, for one reason or another, I’d say give Gnucash a whirl. All it’ll cost is the time to download, install, and run it for a bit.