Adam Monsen

TL;DR – it works well for one specific purpose, for a single user. Use it if you like to tinker and are academically interested in accounting.

I’ve used GnuCash for many years. I started using it without a sense for how much time I’d spend in the manual and forums figuring out the UI/UX. After having done so, I’m still glad I did. I learned quite a bit about double-entry accounting. This way of accounting forces you to contend with the fact that money always comes from somewhere and always goes somewhere. GnuCash maybe does not enough to help you manage this complexity. GnuCash is complex in part because finances are complex, but that’s not a great excuse for its often confusing UI/UX.

GnuCash is strictly single-user. I think this is a good way to think about it, too. Just use it for yourself. Only subject another to it if they really are, let’s say, academically interested in accounting and expect to fiddle with their accounting software (to the point of writing custom reports in Scheme).

Good luck getting a quicken/quickbooks power user to use GnuCash. I can’t speak to proprietary accounting software since I barely used any, though. I’ve never met a pro who used it.

GnuCash is mature. There is a rich body of knowledge available and a strong community.

It is written in C/C++. If it were rewritten it would surely not be. I’m not sure how much this matters in terms of project sustainability though, it has been around since 1998 and is still in active development.

It’s fast.

There is no mobile client.

I have never lost data with GnuCash. This is an incredible confidence-builder (and a requirement) for me. Data is hard work. It appears to be very careful about never losing any with its lock file and log files and such. It is also FOSS, which is a big deal for me.

I’ve used it for business invoicing and I remember being really proud when I got it to spit out good-looking invoices that were true and reconcilable with all my carefully-entered financial data. It’s not worth the effort for simple invoices, though.

If you have the privilege of working with multiple financial institutions, you get to import transactions from multiple sources. This is painful. In the USA this is perhaps painful by design.

I used Mint for a while. All that thing did (besides trigger my privacy spidey-sense) was sort of pull down transactions automatically with a lot of hand-holding. GnuCash is even worse at pulling down transactions, though. I never got the online stuff (OFXDirectConnect/AQBanking) to work well and I recommend against trying it in the USA. Even manual QIF/OFX/CSV importing is a pain, but it is generally predictable and reliable. There’s some intelligence built in (matching, remembering previous categorizations, etc) but it is hard to figure out. The real problem there IMHO is that our banks don’t want to become commodities themselves and they have resisted interoperability. Check out FinTS (was HBCI) in Germany for a counterexample where they’re trying to make it work.

The best part about GnuCash’s UI/UX is also the most boring part (you’ll find boring is a Good Thing with finances): the transaction register. Filling in a ledger for a particular account is very nice, especially in double-line mode. Auto-complete works well. I’ve grown to love the shades of lime green like an old-school paper ledger.

So there you go. One accountant, one desktop, maybe a few reports. Consider using a spreadsheet instead.

Good luck!