When you pay your bills, money from assets goes into paying the liability, and your account remains balanced! Grocery bill goes into Expense->Grocery and goes towards your liability. For example, Salary goes into Income->Salary, and goes towards your assets (Chequing account). It does double entry accounting, meaning each transaction will have 2 records. GnuCash is a financial accounting app written in C. I don’t feel safe handing over my banking password, so I decided to try another application called GnuCash. These applications are most popular, but they either require a subscription, or require login credentials to online banking account. I first looked at popular applications such as and YNAB (You Need A Budget). So last week, I started exploring various personal finance applications to figure out how much money I was saving a year, and how I can increase my savings. If you have installed GnuCash with a MySQL database there is probably an SQL select statement that will export the data in one step.After watching the Toronto housing price skyrocket in the past year, I started to worry if I could ever afford a house. The spreadsheet is QIFtoExcel-Example Easy Ways for Lucky People However, Excel will happily process the information. GNUCASH IMPORT FORMATS WINDOWSNOTE: Excel loses “$” at the start of split lines in the QIF so this doesn’t work well if you have a lot of splits.Īlso, the Java program outputs unix style newlines which looks wierd (no line breaks) in many Windows programs. It has a macro which will read the raw QIF information and make a transaction list in Sheet2. You can open the QIF file in Notepad, copy the content, and paste it into Sheet1 of the following Excel spreadsheet. It simply asks for the XML file to convert and where to put the QIF. With earlier versions of GnuCash you had to fix the XML header but that has already been fixed in 2.4.2 On Windows I use 7Zip but you could just as easily use WinZip or Windows’ built in tool. You do need to un-ZIP the gnucash data file but that is easily done. The other neat thing is the author wrote it in Java so it should run under any Operating System. Going back to QIF makes it a symmetric process – you can get back what went in. This is neat because we usually get data in from a QIF file. There is a great little tool that will take a GnuCash data file and create a QIF file from it. It is a bit harder, and you do end up with duplicates that aren’t totally obvious, but it does work and it is easier than any other option I’ve tried. You can still make it work if you select Assets and Liabilities, export that, select Income and Expenses, and export those. Unfortunately, when I upgraded to 2.4.2 I could no longer select All Accounts. The only slight inconvenience was the report was fairly long and you had to drag for some time (Ctrl-A = Select All, would have been nice). Then you click the top left and drag to the bottom right of the report, copy, and paste wherever you want (Excel worked great). You got a nice report listing everything. You just pick Reports, Transaction Report, Select All Accounts, Sort by Date, include the things you need, and don’t do any totalling. It really was very very simple to Export. One example is the use of XML for the data so, * in theory *, you can get the information into anything else in any format imaginable. It is really just a minor annoyance because GnuCash is Open Source and they’ve done a lot of good things which does make exporting possible. Still, it’s not really a very “Open Source” attitude. It makes sense – a lot of programs these days are happy to import data from other programs they are replacing but are reluctant to provide information for anything replacing it. The version of GnuCash that I’m using at the moment (2.4.2) doesn’t have an option to export the data. It is easy to get information into GnuCash, but getting it out is a different matter.
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