Using GnuCash

Introduction

GnuCash is a complex piece of software with many features and possibilities. It requires some learning and experience to work fluently and effectively with it.

To get you started, it comes with a good concepts guide, that will introduce you to some basic accounting concepts and explains how GnuCash works with those principles.

A second helpful source of information is the GnuCash manual, which is sort of a reference to all the menu options and dialogs in GnuCash. At the time of this writing, it is in need of an update as some new features in GnuCash aren't documented yet.

These two documents cover only a part of what GnuCash can do. This is to be expected as there are as many use cases as there are users of the tool. It would be impossible to contain all of these use cases in a manageable static document.

Instead, this page and the ones linked to below will show ways to deal with specific problems. The examples and solutions are provided by users of GnuCash, most of them use (or have used) these solutions in real world scenarios.

If you know a solution to a particular problem while using GnuCash, you are welcome to add it to these pages as well.

Alternatively you can send it to the GnuCash user mailing list (Note: you need to be subscribed before you can post to this list). Use a subject in the lines of "GnuCash tip" or something similar, so it is easily recognized.

To keep some overview, the examples and solutions are grouped per context in GnuCash.

Reports Included in GnuCash

This section (currently in progress; based on GnuCash 2.2.9) could include a small amount of information about the standard reports in GnuCash, including when they might be used and some of the options included.

Reporting Tips

A single report that shows summary amounts for multiple months for multiple accounts

To create a single report that shows summary amounts for multiple months for multiple accounts (for example, monthly totals for expense accounts over the course of a year), you can accomplish this with a little creative thinking. The trick is to use Gnucash's Budgeting features.

1. First, create a Budget that includes the accounts upon which you ultimately want to base your report and a date range that is useful to you. Save this budget.
2. Next, create a budget report, and in the options for this report, deselect the "Show Budget Amounts" check box. The resulting report will list monthly transaction totals for each account in the budget.

This solution is not perfect (you must, for example, edit the budget to cover the date range you want, and then open the report), but it does give a spreadsheet-like summary of a subset of accounts by month.

--Provided by David T.

Quicken-like "Overview" of your accounts

Quicken provides an "overview" of your accounts -- a list of today's balances for checking, savings, credit cards, major assets and liabilities.

For something similar in GnuCash, run the Balance Sheet report, then go to Options to pick the accounts that you want to see in the overview. Then just leave that tab open, and every time you start GnuCash you'll have the overview. Click "reload" if you put in transactions and want to see how things have changed.

--Provided by Anthony Dardis

Alternatively just keep the "Accounts" tab open. It shows the current balances of all the accounts too, without having to run a report. However, I don't use the business functions, or scheduled transactions, so that might perhaps make a difference.

--Provided by Mike Leone

Displaying Split Account Details in Transaction Report

For a simple transaction like this:

<date> <ref no> "Cheques Received"
 <income account> "multiple payers"     <credit> £157.60
 <bank account>                         <debit>  £157.60

then on a Transaction Report for the bank account the details appear pretty much as above.

For clarity of the accounts, you might enter transactions with multiple splits referring to the same account. For example, the above transaction might well be entered like this:

<date> <ref no> "Cheques Received"
 <income account>  <first payer name>   <credit> £100.00
 <income account>  <second payer name>  <credit> £ 57.60
 <bank account>                         <debit>  £157.60

When this transaction is printed on the bank account's Transaction Report, then under "other account" it simply prints "split" instead of the account name.

To display the additional split detail, you need to set General -> Style = Multi-Line and then you need to turn on Display -> Account Name. Do NOT turn on Display -> Other Account Name.

You can choose whether or not to turn off the full account name using Display -> Use Full Account Name?

The Use Full Other Account Name? has no effect in this configuration.

--Provided by Derek Atkins (in response to Colin Scott)

Monthly Income/Expense Reports

You can export a GnuCash transaction report to HTML and then open the HTML file in Excel. You then have a ready-made data source from which you can create a pivot table with the transaction data grouped both by account and by period, with very few steps involved.

Two enhancements to the data to try are:
 (1) grouping the dates by month; and 
 (2) parsing multilevel account names into columns labeled "Account1", 
 "Account2", etc. using the ":" delimiter. 

This gives you a report that is very close to the monthly/quarterly/yearly income/expense report that MS Money and Quicken provide.

--Provided by Martin Cunningham on gnucash-users