[TriLUG] gnucash anyone?

[Ed Warnicke]

I've been using Gnucash to keep track of my finances sine about May, 
and have been extremely pleased with it...  there is just something 
very clean about double entry accounting when you get down to it.

I've also been helping my father make the transition from 
Quicken to Gnucash.  Based on his experience I would highly recommend
that you read the documentation to get a feel for what is actually going
on.  The double entry system used by Gnucash is very clean and powerful,
but not immediately intuitive to most people.  

For example,  I have a car loan.  Every month I make a car payment
against that loan from my checking account.  My car payment is a
transfer from my checking account ( an asset account ) to my car loan 
account ( a liability account ).  An additional transfer occurs every
month from my car loan account ( a liability ) to my car loan interest 
account ( an expense ).  The net result is that my car payment is NOT an
expense ( as most people would tend to think of it ) but rather simply
the retirement of a liability.  Only my car loan interest is an
expense.   This takes a little getting used to as most people tend to 
mostly think of the world in terms of income and expenses.

I've not tried gnucash on Redhat ( 7.2 or otherwise ).  It does work 
under Debian unstable though ( and has probably propogated into 
testing, but I haven't checked ).

Just my two cents worth.

Ed

On Mon, 2001-12-17 at 19:41, Kevin - The Alchemist - Sonney wrote:
> So, I now ahve one last windows/wine/win4lin dependance : Quicken.
> 
> And gnucash looks mighty attractive.
> 
> Has anyone managed to install this beast on Red hat Linux 7. 2 yet?
> Does anyone have any good/bad things to say about gnucash?
> 
> Thanks, gang...
> -- 
> --------------------------------------------
> --      Kevin "The Alchemist" Sonney      --
> --  New email : alchemist at darkcanvas.com  --
> --  http://www.darkcanvas.com/~alchemist  --
> --  ICQ: 4855069            AIM: ksonney  --
> --------------------------------------------
> 
> "If you'll read the subtext for many of those old strips, you'll find
> the heart of an old-fashioned Libertarian. And I'd be a Libertarian,
> if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners."
>   -- Berkley Breathed, 2001
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