[Discuss] Finance software for Linux

[wdc at mit.edu (William Cattey)]

Hi Derek,

I'll weigh in here on two issues:

1. "Today" isn't really today.

Although I love the "duplicate" feature such that I can log a check today that's the same as a previous one, I hate that the date it offers me is not today's date, but instead the date I started gnucash.  I'm used to leaving my financial tool open across multiple days, and just clicking into it, rather than shutting it down and restarting it.

2. The category to account dialog box is both too smart and too dumb for my tastes.

When I import a QIF file, I get the Dialog Box that prompts me to associate categories with accounts.
When I set an association, two things happen the wrong way for me:
	1. Once an association is established, it does not take effect until a subsequent import.
	2. The associations are apparently not exact. They go into some heuristic table I cannot see, cannot validate, and cannot change.

The result of this is that, if I've got a bunch of checks written to the same merchant in the same month, 
I have to do a lot of redundant clicking that would go away if the association I clicked on a moment ago
now is used for ALL the transactions in the current import to that same Category/Account.

Because of this, and because I didn't want to click my life away for every import until I really knew
what accounts I wanted to create, I built a very fancy data-driven python script that lets me create
QIF files with explicit mappings from categories to accounts.

There are other instances where "you are in a twisty maze of modal dialog boxes all different" that seem to happen a lot in gnucash.



On Jan 14, 2015, at 7:26 PM, Derek Atkins <warlord at MIT.EDU> wrote:

> Rich Braun <richb at pioneer.ci.net> writes:
> 
> [snip]
>> GnuCash, I'm afraid, is even farther behind on the UI usability
>> front. 
> 
> As a long-time GnuCash user and developer, I'm curious what exactly you
> mean by this.  What UI issues do you have/see in GnuCash?  And have you
> let the GnuCash team know about them?
> 
> -derek
> -- 
>       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
>       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
>       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
>       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available
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