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Comment by elric | Hacker News Reader

"Simple" is not an adjective I'd associate with GnuCash. Maybe it is if you're coming from a background in accounting or have a penchant for numbers. It's pretty complicated, and I wouldn't recommend it to someone who just wanted to keep an eye on their budget. A simple spreadsheet will suffice. Or any number of more user friendly tools.

That being said, GnuCash is a powerful double entry book keeping system which can almost certainly handle all your bookkeeping needs. But simple, it is not.

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I also wasn't super sure about sticking "simple" in the title, but while writing this article and going through the GnuCash setup steps, I actually started to feel like it was appropriate.

As another commenter mentioned, I think that the "complicated" part of using GnuCash is understanding double-entry bookkeeping, which is why I devoted so much time in the article trying to explain it in concrete terms. My intention here isn't necessarily to steer people to GnuCash itself (I'm learning about a lot of alternatives from these comments), but to simplify the core underlying concepts. Not sure if I achieved that, but I tried!

Given the typical audience of HN.. if you already know how to program you already know how to use something that's way more complicated than GnuCash.

GnuCash is very simple if you already know double-entry accounting... and learning double-entry accounting would probably be the work of a weekend or less for anyone who knows how to program. Not hard.

I've been a longtime GnuCash user, and really it's as simple as you want it to be. You can, for example simulate the Spreadsheet approach with 3 accounts: Checking, and two hidden accounts: Income and Expenses. Make Checking the default tab, hide a few columns you're basically done. And if you decide you need a more complicated model, all those extra features are there and available on your schedule.

Probably the biggest hurdle IMO is the single user nature. Even the SQL backend requires a global lock.

I agree with it being simple. I used it when I needed to learn about accounting for my day job. I used it for 2 or 3 months for my personal expenses. I could not continue because I got lazy. But I learned a lot about accounting from using it - certainly helped me with my day job.

Double entry booking is complicated but it pays off to learn if also for personal finance because errors are much less likely than with a spreadheet.

This is commonly stated, but I found it relatively straightforward once I saw the extended accounting equation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_equation) and knew every entry needed a corresponding entry to make the equation balance.

Assets = Liabilities + Equity + (Income - Expenses)

For some reason the (Income - Expenses) part gets left off in many introductory explanations of the accounting equation. I think that leads to a lot of confusion about how to treat Income and Expense accounts in programs like GnuCash for newcomers to double entry accounting.

I agree this is important to understanding double-entry accounting. Keep in mind that the Income - Expenses gets elided because the Retained Earnings go towards Equity

I wish somebody did an explainer of all this, not just for dummies, but for us European dummies. I've approached this topic multiple times, and I always get confused by all these Liquidities, Equities, Accounts Payables, Accounts Receivables, Commodities, and how come any article trying to explain any of that starts talking about stock trading.

The first time I tried to use GnuCash was many years ago. I began by opening up the documentation and reading the overview, which, it turned out, began with a fairly lengthy history of the practice of double-book accounting. I later found that this choice, which isn't necessarily a negative, did a fair job of representing GnuCash as a whole.

It is not that hard, I followed a Youtube tutorial and about a week later things clicked in place for me. I am glad I put the effort because I feel that I've gained a skill that will change my approach to money for the rest of my life.

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