On Sun, Aug 08, 2004 at 11:50:43AM -0400, David P James wrote: > > GnuCash is the best of the lot, but that isn't saying very much. > > I don't find GnuCash terribly usable for personal finances. The > double-entry bookeeping that GnuCash uses doesn't work very well with > personal finances. In the main window you end up with expense and > income accounts piling up in a rather meaningless way. I took a few > business accounting courses in university and I really don't think that > double entry is appropriate for personal finance since categories of > expense/consumption become accounts with cash flowing in, which makes > absolutely no sense in the context of personal finance. GnuCash may > well be useful for businesses (I wouldn't know) but for personal > finance it's just plain annoying since the goal of each is different. > > For personal finance I use KMyMoney2, since conceptually it's far more > like Quicken on Windows (and probably MS Money as well).
I found doing double-entry accounting for my personal finances quite natural. There's only one rule: the debits must equal the credits. *Everything* else is just a matter of taste. (For instance, Enron could have had all the wacky business deals it wanted, if it had merely piled up all the balancing transactions in some on-book account. Anything goes, swing from the rafters, but create a special account to balance it, and there it is on the books.) Paying for lunch at McDonalds is a $5 credit to the Food account; $5 debit from cash, on the general ledger. Withdrawing money from the ATM is a debit from checking, credit to cash. Your employer is an Accounts Receivable, and the Power Company is an accounts payable. The only problem with GnuCash was the U/I: it made it exceedingly awkward to work with large #s of accounts, because of all the modal dialogs to enter them. Nothing wrong with the concept. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
