> We live in a world where Intuit has fought VERY hard to make damn sure no one can use anything but Quickbooks

It depends on geography. According to Codat's 2021 report [0] on SME accounting market share:

- In the US, QuickBooks is the clear market leader, with 75.7% combined market share across their three main offerings (QB Online, QB SE and QB Desktop). FreshBooks is in second place at 4.5%, and Wave and Xero equal third at 3.5% each

- In the UK, Sage is the market leader, with a combined market share of 28.8% across their three main UK products (Sage 50/50 Cloud, Sage Accounting, and Sage 200cloud); QuickBooks combined market share (Online+Desktop+SE) is closely behind, in second place at 26.2%; and Xero is in third place at 24%

- In Australia + New Zealand, Xero is in first place at 49.4% market share, MYOB in second place at 33.8%, QuickBooks comes third at 11.2%

- In Canada, QuickBooks is the clear market leader with a combined market share of 68.2%; FreshBooks is in second place at 6.9%; while Sage at 6.4% is in third place. Kashoo comes fourth at 4.3%, and Wave, Xero and Logiciel Actiff are equal fifth at 3.8% each.

So, it is really only in North America that "no one can use anything but Quickbooks" is remotely true – and even there, close to 25% of US SMEs and over 30% of Canadian SMEs are successfully using "something other than Quickbooks".

But I agree it is likely true, that for the vast majority of US small-to-medium businesses, GNUCash is not a realistic alternative to Quickbooks. But what about FreshBooks or Wave or Xero? Or the dozen other commercial accounting software vendors with some presence in the US market?

[0] https://www.codat.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Codat_Global...

> Your bank will hate you

Why? Surely all US banks use open, standardized data formats to export financial statements and to execute transactions in bulk? Or are you thinking of another reason?

US banking is a shitshow which is decades European banking, addressing that would benefit everyone.

> Your investors will hate you

Why? Surely your investors are interested in accurate accounting? Can gnucash not generate some kind of report they need? If so, that should be a trivial fix.

> Some places won't audit without Quickbook

That is an impressive shitshow of a situation.

I actually have had an accountant come into engineering and tell me I had to use netbeans!

Just kidding of course. Thank you for your post. I had considered using gnu cash many times in this situation and I'm likely to have done it. Luckily someone else handled the accounting portion for the last gig.

I badly want gnu cash to be a thing. I really hate into it. And I want them to fail. I would love if gnu cash is what made them fail. But it sounds like it's going to take a whole lot more than just a few sacrifices like us. We'll just go through misery, and nothing will be affected cuz we'll end up stuck on QuickBooks anyway.

We used GNUCash for a few years for small business accounting. After a while we migrated to Quickbooks Online as it has some features that GNUCash was missing, e.g., automatically pulling in PayPal and bank transactions and inventory management. This turned out to be a very frustrating experience. Due to the following:

- The price increased every year. We started at about $60/month and after a few years it $80/month. Today the same plan is $99/month.

- The PayPal integration randomly stopped working and was missing transactions. QB customer support was completely useless and we spent hours searching and manually adding transactions. The bank integration (via Plaid) was also not reliable.

- The inventory management is very limited. E.g. you can't repack/combine items without using weird hacks.

So, after a few years I got very frustrated and ended up moving to ERPNext. Migrating all the data was quite a bit of work and involved a number of Python scripts to pull out the data from QB and re-create it in ERPNext, but after about a week we had 5 years of data migrated.

ERPNext is not perfect, but works quite well for us. A big difference to QB is that it supports inventory and manufacturing operations. It also has an API that is fairly easy to use and we use it to get transaction data from PayPal and Stripe.

I’m pretty sure it is 100% gonna bite you, yes. (In a large part of ex-USSR countries, we had the same problem with 1C – it’s less of a pain to use other options now, I think, but it’s still bad.)

But the only way to hopefully get to a world where you don’t need Quickbooks anymore is to fight back, not for them. And like you said, Intuit can buy off startups, so this leaves us with free open source systems... like GnuCash.

Serious question: is it not possible to export/import into Quickbooks for example? I agree with the principle of letting the accountant choose, just wondering if there's any way at all to "fight back", for lack of a better word.

I would like to learn more about this. Why is it that those things won't work with GnuCash?

A lot of other people seem interested, if you have a blog this would be a great post.

The situation seems quite dire.

>The world has chosen QuickBooks. This choice was made under duress and with corrupt power brokering.

And yet knowing this has gone on, you refuse to continue to fight the good fight even still? Sounds like you're part of the problem my man.

I'm so fucking tired of corporate apologists/appeasers.

I did this exercise for a little over a year to understand my expenses in detail. Like the OP, I found it really frustrating to do with any bookkeeping software I tried, to the point where I eventually gave up as I didn't think it was worth the effort. I started writing a web app to make this easier but just didn't have the motivation to finish.

With that said, I learned quite a bit as a result of that level of granularity. When all expenses at Amazon, Walmart, etc go into the same bucket, it's really difficult to truly understand what you're spending your money on and if you have a problem you need to curb. Seeing "$X in spending at Amazon" isn't really that useful without knowing how important or frivolous any of those expenses were.

I’m with you on that one. Been tracking my personal finances since 2011 and I have yet found a need to go deeper with analysis. Although I can imagine it could be interesting to go extra deep, e.g. to observe changes in my nutritional habits based on my grocery receipts juxtaposed with, say, my bloodwork. But even then it’d be a gimmick as I could not potentially rely on any correlation noticed. I’m sure someone could come up with a better example.

In any case, unless tracking gets super easy, with digital receipts saved directly onto our mobile devices and standardized for processing, I just couldn’t be bothered to break down paper receipts.

That BTW makes me wonder why have we not seen e-receipts standardized yet. We can pay wirelessly with devices, so why not save some more meta data about the transaction, including the receipt itself? Seems like a low hanging fruit, also saving tons of paper.

At the grocery store it would be extremely useful to understand where money is going related to other food groups (diary is 10% more). At the garage or clothing store not very useful because the entire purchase is a good group but how much you are paying for meat could help you decide to buy it elsewhere but allow you to keep buying bread.

I feel like it isn't for the vast majority of people. I did a bit of tracking on my spending but it just ends up showing that the vast majority of my spending was on rent and fixed bills which are very easy to track in just a spreadsheet. The amount I'm spending on biscuits and milk week to week doesn't matter at all in the grand scheme.

A lot of banking apps these days will automatically categorize your spending as well which eliminated much of the need to manually enter it in to a different app.

Just tracking no but allocating yes.

If you plan ahead you know how much money you actually have and can plan better.

I find I save way more with a proper budget in place.

The sweetspot is to group by providers. Unless you have a huge all in one provider, you'll have enough granularity.

At some point I really should do a first principles analysis of why I track money... as far as I know, it mostly comes down to: 1. is fraud happening? and 2. Am I saving enough for retirement? Oh, and I guess 3. taxes

For fraud, I think it's basically a matter of whether we can recognize each transaction. You don't actually need to download transactions for that; you can just skim your monthly statements.

For saving, that's tricky because there needs to be that recognition of what categories are likely to increase during retirement versus decrease. I gave that a single pass a while back, and now I have a count each month of those expense categories that will continue into retirement, along with a 12-month average, so I can get a sense of what my portfolio needs to be able to fund after I retire. For that, even though I have Banktivity, I also have to use a spreadsheet.

For taxes, I don't know if anything really makes that easy. It's hard to know what category breakdown you really need to know whether you're capturing all your tax benefit, and my financial software doesn't tell me "oh, by the way, you'll want to split that transaction since some of it has a tax benefit."

For this I recommend https://actualbudget.com/ . It is in many ways like You Need A Budget but you can host it yourself for free.

Envelope budgeting works really well, tbh. Especially for saving.

Due to a colossal screw up my bank had after I moved back to my home country, it took me several months to get a new debit card. So I got used to just taking out X cash per month, and dividing it.

I’ve tried a few financial tracking things since getting back on the card wagon, and found none of them actually have the same result (spending less) as just dividing cash into physical buckets.

I haven't gotten a single bill over SMS, is this an US thing?

That's a big win! There are very few things more frustrating than software that keeps changing the UI just because some designed somewhere wants to feel busy.

Make it work well and then stop fiddling with it.

You can write scripts to transform XML documents as well.

GnuCash has a scripting engine. If you have to do a specific correction very often, it might be worth it to implement something. If possible, the CSV should be preprocessed of course.

If nothing else works, a Gnucash file is XML. A bit annoying to work with, but quite possible.

And since the CSV importer is terrible there are always a lot of edits to do unfortunately.

Exactly. I can try out stupid stuff, but because it's all text files and no magic, reverting back is as easy as it gets.

Yeah, I've never found XML to be easy to edit/bulk edit/edit by hand. I suppose there are tools that would allow me to do that but since I would use them sporadically, I'd need to re-learn them every use. At the same ^D/^KD in Sublime works just fine.

Sure: https://github.com/blackle/GnuCashAutoInvoice/tree/main

It's kinda a mess tbh, and it actually also requires some non-exposed symbols to work properly, so it needs access to the GnuCash source code. I wouldn't recommend doing this unless you're ok with maintaining your own unsupported GnuCash feature.

I agree with using the tool that works best for your purpose.

For me, I found that the SQLite models of GnuCash aren't straightforward to query. That's why Beancount created its own query language. Martin Blais has a good discussion of why a traditional database doesn't quite fit for many accounting purposes https://beancount.github.io/docs/beancount_query_language.ht...

Part of the reason I settled on beancount over h/ledger was the ease of writing python plugins to handle mutations and rules, and reuse the official parse/output as a library.

Plaintext is nice for git but I only feel that when fixup-ing a single or small number of transactions. It does feel nice to be have all the details of a transaction in one place in a visually useful way. For one-off hacking and such it definitely feels easier to write O(n^4) python looping over trying to describe things with SQL and working at a scale where it doesn’t matter.

Plaintext as a UI into a SQL store seems an interesting project. I would love a git integration for committing changes after diff review and being able to stage individual txns or parts. Many years ago I was frustrated with ledger’s more loosey goosey syntax and trying these things and eventually gave up whatever the idea was at the time. I like the idea of a constant bidrectional sql<->plaintext that provides a requirement for reproducible parsing and serializing

Not to go off topic - this story did inspire me to install gnucash again and enjoy the GUI -

> parsing it in a structured way is a nightmare

Ah, well that’s the job of the PTA app - converting “just text” to something very structured and validated. Which can then be moved into SQLite, if one likes.

> and scripting edits to plain text is a mess.

I suppose it depends. There are a lot of very powerful and quick tools and techniques for automated or assisted text munging.

I build my transaction list in Excel and then export that to .beancount with a very simple script. You could do the same with sql except even easier.

That gives me the benefits of Fava and all the other PTA tools as well.

It's a decent experience for personal accounting if you follow the advice from the beancount cookbook/manual for organizing things. I wish there was a bit more integration between the experience of editing and reviewing accounts, and started https://github.com/seltzered/beancolage as an initial attempt.

How is the GnuCash DB any different from using an Access DB?

For simplified bookkeeping GnuCash, and most generalized bookkeeping programs, is overkill.

I accomplish the same thing with 250 lines of Python, and the result is that I get exactly the numbers I need to enter into Skatteverkets e-tjänst, and nothing else. And each transaction is one yaml file, and stored off-site with git.

It might be easier to use, but it's not a simpler technology.

Arguably, XML’s schemas are better than SQLite’s constraints, especially in this domain.

I agree with bdjsiqoocwk that XML is way simpler than SQLite. In the case where I'm making changes by hand, it's much easier to open an XML file in a text editor and edit it, than it is to figure out an SQL query to do the same thing. In the case where I'm making changes programmatically, libraries will handle the complexity of XML for me, but I will still have to struggle through figuring out an SQL query if I'm trying to connect to SQLite.

SQLite is easier if you're comfortable with SQL to the extent that it's little to no effort for you to write queries. But most people aren't that comfortable, and XML offers them significant advantages. I certainly prefer XML at any rate.

Far too often I've ended up with corrupt SQLite db files. At times it wasn't discovered until much later (i.e. most queries would still work). Very hard to fix (in fact, I never did fix any).

With XML, under version control, you can identify easily what went wrong.

It is not weird at all if you think of it from an implementation perspective: it is much easier and simpler to write an XML parser than it is to write a loader for SQLite databases, even if you do not write an SQL parser for it.

After all there are way more independent XML parsers implemented in a variety of programming languages than there are SQLite implementations :-P.

How is SQLite DB simpler than a human readable markup language?!

Suppose you don't have SQLite, how do you open a SQLite database? The only way is you have to re-implement SQLite from scratch. Good luck with that.

Now imagine you don't have vim, how do you open an XML file? You can use any of other thousands of text editors out there, or any of tens of libs in tens of different languages.

I think your take that sqlite is simpler than a text file is the weird one.

Can't speak of Japan, but where I've lived the percentage of tax is calculated against total sales, you don't need it separated beforehand

I believe there are some exceptions, with regulated or specially taxed goods like cigarettes, but there was none of those where I worked so it's mostly speculation

Do you have any tips on where to start?

Why not just setup a VM for Money specifically?

Getting OT here, but I've tended to prefer Gnome apps with a KDE desktop. The latest UI pessimizations in Gnome may having me switch completely away from Gnome, with the "You must click on sub menus to open them" being the final straw.

Well, the applicable standard in this case would be “Web Development” writ large. Responsiveness is a start, but consistency is one of the most important design principles, and this site seems to disrespect user expectations about layout, menus, and interactable elements, from a glance.

Responsiveness in particular is “inexcusable” to miss because it’s so easy that it’s practically boilerplate these days, and the lack makes it impossible to read on mobile. Will I be convinced by this update to try GnuCash? We’ll never know, because I can’t read the changelog!

I know I’m a zoomer, but zoomers have money too! A little. Sometimes. And for what it’s worth: I’m pretty sure this is an accounting app, not a finance app ;)