GnuCash is the free software movement’s contribution to personal finance. The free software movement’s track record is pretty good when it comes to stability and features, and I was definitely interested in how it would do against Quicken.

Free Software?
The free software movement, for those who haven’t heard of it before, believes that software should be free—no price whatsoever. It is an economic, political, and technological phenomenon. It tends to be software written by experts for experts, and has a reputation for being both more stable and a bit less usable than its commercial counterparts, though there are exceptions. Most web servers are Apache (free software) running on Linux (free software). On the desktop side, the Mozilla browser & email client are part of this same movement. You might also have heard of OpenOffice.org.

Installation
If I owned a Linux distribution, it would probably already have GnuCash on it, and I would probably already be using it; what I actually have is a Mac OS X (Panther) box, so the first order of business was to get it installed. This was not so trivial, since it doesn’t exist yet as a single Mac OS application bundle. Most free software packages allow you to download the source code and then configure and build it for your system—after you’ve installed all of its dependencies. And this is where it can get hairy, as you keep Googling, downloading, and installing ad infinitum.

Fortunately, there is something called Fink for Mac OS X, which an interface to “debian”, which will automatically do all of this for you. Simply choose the package you want and it will go to the work of downloading, unpacking, configuring, and installing the package of interest plus all of its dependencies. Good enough! I fire up Fink, choose gnucash, and click on the install button.

Twenty-six hours later—yes, twenty-six hours of continuous machine use later—GnuCash is installed. This is the longest software install I have ever performed for any reason, including operating system upgrades. Astonishing. I am in awe of the fact that it worked at all—beyond the initial button click I didn’t have to do anything else—but there is no way I could recommend this with a straight face to anyone. “Yeah, give GnuCash a shot. It’s just a twenty-six hour install. And make sure you have broadband.” Note: sometimes Fink has binary distributions available. Back when I was using Jaguar, Fink had most things I wanted (like The Gimp) available as binary installs, which install with a speed equivalent to most other downloadable software. But they have not filled out their binary repository for Panther yet, evidently.

It also dumped 1.07 GB of software on my disk. Yes, over a gigabyte. Essentially, I had to install, from source, most of Linux on my machine in order to get GnuCash. Now, of course, it’s a lot less trouble to incrementally add other applications, but in terms of the threshold of buy-in…yikes. Fortunately, it’s all installed under a single directory, called /sw, so if I get disenchanted and want my gig back, it’s a simple procedure.

Starting up GnuCash
Then I launched it. If you’ve never used X11 before, you need to know that most free software also requires X11, a portable network-based graphics standard from MIT that has been around for a long time. It’s pretty well integrated into MacOS X—the X11 server itself runs as an application, and the windows have Aqua trimming. Unfortunately, the insides of the windows are just about as ugly as they can be. All rectangles, no frills, gray, with unaliased, small-print fonts.

Having seen installations of Red Hat 9 (a Linux distribution) on which the graphics looked remarkably better, I assume that this “theme” is a default and if only I understood it better, I could dress it up more. My point is, the default install under MacOS X looks kinda crummy, as you can see below. (Very fast, though; Aqua is never this fast, even under Panther.)



Setup
Setting up GnuCash was extremely easy. I was able to export my entire Quicken database into one giant QIF file, and GnuCash was able to read that in without any mistakes and set up my accounts, categories, and reconciliation history. Excellent! Highest praise!

View of the World
GnuCash doesn’t use categories, like Quicken, which is a bit disconcerting. Instead, it considers everything to be an account, which means that you end up having dozens of accounts, some of which are actual accounts at financial institutions and the rest of which are used to track spending categories. (See? I can’t stop saying “categories”.) This leads to some distracting views of my data, where, for example, I can see every dollar I’ve ever spent on the telephone since my file began, which is a nice scary number but not very interesting otherwise to me.

Fortunately, although it is the default, GnuCash provides a preference for suppressing these “category” accounts. Click the Options button in the Accounts window and deselect all the account types below “Currency”—Income, Expense, Equity, etc.

Daily Use
The account register is great, handling completion of transaction information just like Quicken, with the disconcerting difference that simply tabbing past the last piece of information in a transaction enters it. I could get used to this, but I like the way that Quicken makes it clear exactly when the transaction has been fully entered. It’s also very fast and responsive.

The register also sports the lowercase letters ‘y’ or ‘n’ in a column to indicate reconciliation status. This is much harder to visually "parse from a distance" than boldface checkmarks or a change in color or, frankly, just about anything except a plain-text ‘y’ or ‘n’.

Split transactions are handled much as they are in Quicken, with each transaction within the split getting its own category (er, expense account). Just as with Quicken, when a memorized split comes up and you need to change it substantially, it’s a bit difficult.

Reporting
Making reports is an important requirement, and GnuCash does this well. One thing it does even better than Quicken is that as it creates new graphs, the old ones are saved as tabs and you can use back- and forward-buttons to browse them in the order they were created. Cool!

The bad news is that all I can do is look at them on-screen. Printing was abysmally bad—weird characters inserted, top 1/3 of the graph cut off…this screenshot is from the very top of the page.


Yuck! What is that? It’s unacceptable, that’s what. On screen it looks fine.

Reconciling
This was really well done. The interface was as good as Quicken’s, and it was faster and more responsive. One annoyance that is probably more X11's fault than GnuCash’s is that the window staggering really costs me time, since I always want the windows in the same place. For those who don’t know, window staggering is the choice of creating a new window slightly lower and to the right of the last created window so that it doesn’t obscure the existing windows. Sounds good on paper, and in many cases really is the right answer, but in this case I always want the windows to appear in the same place, and despite checking GnuCash’s “Remember window geometry” preference, it didn’t; so I assume, as I said, that this has more to do with X11. Quicken does the right thing here.

Stability
Never crashed, not once. I noted to my alarm that it did not appear to be saving the data file with each transaction entered, as Quicken does; instead, when going to quit, it would ask if I wanted to save my changes. “You mean you haven’t been saving this whole time?” I wanted to ask, but there wasn’t any such button. Perhaps they are confident enough in the application’s stability that they feel they don’t need to do that.

Online Banking
This is the big one, of course, the thing that has me married to Quicken. GnuCash has a single online banking feature: import of QIF files. As mentioned before, it does this very well, but it means two things:

First, that I can’t send online checks directly from its register, a feature I truly love in Quicken. I want to just write the check as though I were recording it, typing “SEND” for the check number, then have the program ship the transaction in the next online banking batch. So I would need to learn to do this some different way, probably via CheckFree's website.

Second, that I can’t import transactions from institutions that use Web Connect instead of direct QIF export. The two credit cards that I use with Quicken at present both use Web Connect and do not supply QIF files directly. So I can’t use GnuCash with those either. I could, of course, drop those credit cards and find others that do traffic in QIF (or OFX, another protocol supported by GnuCash). But that was farther than I wanted to go for this review.

My bank itself does support QIF export, but the problem with trying to auto-import that QIF file is that the QIF file from the bank contains less information than my register. Checks that I have filled out with payee names and categories are just “Draft 002764” in the bank’s file, and that’s not enough information for GnuCash to do the right thing with it. Contrast this to my credit card downloads, which come with correct payee information and category information. But again…I can’t get QIF exports of those.

Conclusion
If I used a Linux box, I would be using GnuCash already, no doubt. The extra advantages of Quicken would be nothing compared to the pain of rebooting into Windows or using WINE or other such crutch. GnuCash is very good and very quick, and I’ll bet that the printing problems are solved on Linux platforms.

Ironically, one of the things that this process has done is to make me appreciate the usability and aesthetics of Quicken. Despite its quirks and its crashes, its visuals harmonize much better with Mac OS X, and its menus, dialogs, and defaults are very well thought out.

Next in this series: iBank takes the stand.