It also provides a paper trail after every session as a separate (timestamped) file for review or recovery purposes. The downside is some non-intuitive behaviour when splitting an already entered transaction (which you will eventually figure out), and the rather obtuse way in which you enter budgeting data - the budgeting report however is very straightforward and allows you to change dates and which accounts are included very easily. GNUCash is not a "pretty" program but it is extremely functional and free. The Intuit rep explained to me that I had no choice and was forced to buy this free data from them "because business owners are too stupid to enter the (6) percentages themselves". Also, GNUCash will leave your payroll percentages alone while Intuit has programmed QuickBooks to delete all your payroll percentages every time you use it after February each year unless you buy the free IRS Circular E from Intuit each year. In this sense it leaves Quicken in the dust and is far easier to use than QuickBooks. You can split transactions just as you would in a paper based accounting system to show all the elements for the cash flow on every transaction, or use any of the (perhaps 50) built in reports to generate a balance sheet, income statement, and other common accounting reports. Those who delve deeper will find this is actually a double entry (professional) accounting system with any number of ledgers you desire to create. I use GNUCash on my desktop, over my LAN to a server, and over Internet via my SSH connection. If you want to learn a small amount, you can also download your bank statements in various formats, including Quicken format, and click File Import to auto-magically insert them into your checkbook register. On the most basic level you simply fill in your checkbook register. GNUCash is an open source free package that works much like the for-profit Quicken program without the spyware (content guard) bundled in by Intuit. That makes it hard to outsource your bookkeeping. The worst thing is that it's hard to find bookkeepers, at least in the US, that are familiar with it. That makes sharing the data a bit more cumbersome than it would be otherwise. There is no good web front end the only front end with a complete feature set is a desktop application. That means that if you want to integrate the data into other systems, it's more cumbersome than it should be. GnuCash is cross-platform which means it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It's also self-hosted which means you keep your own database files locally. If configured to do so, it uses a central MySQL database, which makes it work like enterprise software, where various people in the organization perform bookkeeping tasks. Once my company grew to the point where I had to outsource my bookkeeping, I switched to QuickBooks because most bookkeepers I found were unfamiliar with GnuCash. ![]() ![]() I liked using GnuCash when my organization was small and I did all of the bookkeeping myslef. But the menu structure layout is like the late 90s early 00s desktop application era and, in my opinion, can and should be improved upon. I am okay with this because double-entry accounting is a well-established process and less change is ultimately better. The UI still feels a bit dated, even with recent updates since version 3.0. We generally work from two different computers with a network file share, and often one user will forget to close the application, keeping the file lock in place. Still haven't solved the multi-user limitation. I was appealed by the low barrier to entry, including free download and installation, as well as strong documentation for an administrator that prefers to configure my own software. I've tried a few different data store backend options (including mysql, postgresql, and XML file) - I landed long term on the XML file storage because it has had the least issues. It has been a rock solid tool for managing transactions and monitoring fiscal health in the short and long term.
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