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Comment by gadiyar | Hacker News Reader

Any users of GnuCash here? Folks recommending Excel may be missing the value double-entry accounting brings.

As much as I dislike excel(mainly because of the weak data model), it can do double entry accounting just fine.

Do you have any templates? Happy Ledger user here, but I'd be curious to learn how people do double-entry accounting in Excel.

Not really, I don't do much in excel anymore, And I probably should not be giving advice as I have no classical training in accounting. But the ledger docs have a pretty great introduction to basic accounting theory. It is not too difficult to apply this theory into whatever data storage engine you are using.

https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html#Principles-of-Accoun...

the data page might be as simple as

  id|date|comment|from|from_amount|to|to_amount|balance_func()

then a few report pages summing the values

That simple schema fails to represent split transactions. I went the superstore and bought groceries, computer gear, and a new battery for the car. Oh and my spouse handed me a $100 bill to cover some of the cost.

Yes, a simplified schema like that fails to capture the entire semantics of a transaction. However, I find for personal finance I never need full transaction semantics and simplified two party semantics are much easier to enter and calculate.

I will be honest, I use ledger and I like how it can express the complex transaction, however I also have to admit that I have never used them. If I were storing my finance data in a relational database or a spreadsheet, I would be very tempted to use the simplified two party model. I probably would not actually do it, but when I am elbow deep in code making sure to handle N-Party transactions correctly, I would be tempted.

The author of the plain text accounting system(PTA) went with this simplified model and made a good case for it, one line per transaction is much easier to parse, for both the human reading them and the machine. note that PTA does support split transactions but they are the special case.

https://mandoc.bsd.lv/pta/README

I do use it, and it's quite good.

The main problem is that I don't want to give a third party access to my bank accounts, so importing into gnucash is (1) download pdf statements from bank (2) use python scripts I wrote to convert to csv (3) use gnucash importer to import.

This is fairly painful stuff, more so because my bank statements are all generated on different days of the month. So I can't form a habit of doing this regularly enough to make the data useful.

Ouch, this is painful indeed. I thought all banks provided a way to download transactions in a machine-readable format.

Welcome to Canada. The checking/saving account statement is in csv. The credit card statements are only provided as pdf by my bank. That's where most transactions are.

Just started using it last month. Used Mint until a year or two after Intuit bought it, then basically did no real budgeting until my recent GnuCash use.

A few YouTube vids made the interface less daunting and I read a few Reddit comments on how people use it themselves, and I'm applying what I can to my own setup.

If there's anything a new GnuCash user should read or learn, please let me know!

Their tutorial and concept guide is quite good, also to understand basic accounting concepts: https://gnucash-docs-rst.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#

Yep, since about 2003.

For the past decade or so I record the transactions on the mobile version, and use desktop software to dissect the data in more effective ways.

Wow didn't know there was a mobile app. How do you sync?

Via google drive. It's not an automatic sync but it's sufficiently low-friction one for my purposes.

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