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Comment by Cerium | Hacker News Reader

I've been using GnuCash for a couple years now. It works well once you set it up and get a feel for its interface. It has the features I need for my small side business. I would recommend it.

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Hey might I ask you about the num column in the BAS account template?

Are you supposed to keep that globally unique or just for each verification you log? Because if it's only a local sequence for each verification you make then there's bound to be overlap between account views.

And if it's globally unique then I'd like GnuCash to automatically increment it.

I don't know about the BAS account template, but my accounts have the num column as well. I thought it was used for ordering transactions that occur on the same date. Personally, I just stopped using it because it rarely matters for me the order of multiple transactions in the same day.

Looking at this page on gnucash.org now (1), it's referred to as just "optional Num (such as a check number)". Hope that helps.

[1] http://gnucash.org/docs/v2.4/C/gnucash-guide/txns-registers1...

I think it's an open field for you to use however you want. E.g. If it's a Bill and you use the bill functionality, that column gets auto-populated for you using the "Bill ID". Likewise for sales-receipts, it gets populated with the Receipt ID that you filled in when creating the sales receipt. If you leave them blank when creating those items, an auto-incremented ID gets filled in. At least for Receipts and Bills, GNUCash keeps separate sequences of unique IDs.

So, you can use it to match it against a bill, invoice, whatever is applicable to that entry.

Also, had a quick look in the account XML regarding Bill/Receipt ID. It get's stored as ID, even though the bill/receipt has a unique GUID to identify it. I would assume that means it need-not be unique.

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