Re: Quicken under debian - gnucash
Paul Scott,,, wrote:
> David P James wrote:
>
>> Paul Scott,,, wrote:
>>> Neal Lippman wrote:
>>>
>>>> I am wondering if anyone could recommend a solution
>>>> for using Quicken on my debian woody system.
>>>> Quicken is essentially the ONLY windows application
>>>> that I still need, and thus is the only reason that
>>>> my laptop still has windows98 loaded on it.
>>
>> Except unfortunately gnucash mangles the concepts of
>> 'categories' and 'accounts', which, to be honest, I
>> really do not like.
>
>
> It took me a moment to get used to it but categories
> really are accounts so that just made it easier for me to
> move on to other uses for their automatic double entry.
>
I still don't like it much. Quicken accounts are "liquid" in
that they hold (hopefully) money. But categories do not;
they are where money goes or comes from but they do not in
themselves hold any money. That is, my chequing account
holds money; my car's gas expenditure category/account does
not. I understand the use of double entry but it is still
quite annoying. The numbers that show up in the totals
column at the right are almost completely meaningless for
anything orther than the "liquid" accounts.
>> On the flip side, guncash did detect some mistakes that
>> had gone uncorrected in my Quicken files for years, so
>> I went back and fixed them in Quicken.
>
>
> That's good.
>
>> At this point I'm still using Quicken and hence Windows
>> 95. I'm going to try an account-by-account import into
>> kmymoney2 (mentionned in a recent Debian Weekly News)
>> shortly. I tried a whole import (as in gnucash) but
>> that got really botched up.
>
>
> gnucash imported a very large setup for me with no
> errors. The only problem I had was getting used to the
> sequence for entering splits.
Once I fixed my years-old problems in Quicken the import
went well for me as well, though not without annoyances.
Being a Canadian, I became just a little bit sick of seeing
"CAD" all over the place. Plus there was no listing for the
TSE (Toronto Stock Exchange) in the list of exchanges for my
score or so of mutual funds. In fact, the overall handling
of mutual funds was very badly mangled. For reasons I cannot
fathom, dividends, interest and capital gains to each fund
were assigned an account of their own. It's almost
impossible to get a handle on the value of one's portfolio
through time using Gnucash as it refuses to give you a value
balance even on dates when it has everything it needs ... ie
if you buy or sell shares then both a share price and a
total quantity of shares is available for that day, so an
asset calculation can be but isn't performed, unlike in
Quicken. I also really miss Quicken's willingness to
estimate or give you a last known value - that little blue
'e' was always a good incentive to go update things so as to
get a more precise number. Now I just see zeros all over.
>
>> Of course, what I would really like to see is Quicken
>> ported to Linux, even if I had to pay for it.
>
>
> I had similar thoughts but I'm glad that gnucash expanded
> my mind a little. Now I only use Windows for things
> people pay me to do.
>
> Paul
>
> Paul
>
>
I'm glad you like it but I just find it too much of a pain.
Not to mention worries of backwards-compatibility with
Quicken - I don't want to find that in a couple of years
Quicken is ported to linux but all my data for the previous
years is unusable. Anyway, this is straying a little
off-topic for a debian mailing list :)
--
David P. James
Ottawa, Ontario
http://members.rogers.com/dpjames/
The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe.
-Dr. Leonard McCoy, Star Trek IV
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