Which personal finance program would you suggest: GnuCash or KmyMoney?

I am currently using Ubuntu version 12.10. I had planned on being further down-the-road in my testing of both products, but alas it is now December 31, 2012. My objective is to dump Quicken.

To get the data out of Quicken and into either GnuCash or KmyMoney, I need to generate a QIF, which turns out to be less than satisfactory. As an editorial aside, Quicken is very hostile when it comes to sharing (exporting/importing) data. In fact, the ability to export/import data from Quicken seems to have been essentially depreciated. A major reason for moving to a Linux based accounting program.

So far, I have only accomplished preliminary massaging of imported data. In terms of testing, it has been easier to import data into GnuCash than into KmyMoney. Last night I was able to ascertain that KmyMoney "chokes" when attempting to import securities. The program crashes. I will be checking into how to resolve this issue since it is critical.

Which accounting program would you suggest?

I've used GnuCash for over a year now - no problems at all. It is a little clunky, but it will do all that I want.

Ive been using KMM for about 4 years now. Couldnt live without it... Its pretty easy to configure, uses the standard ledger style instead of the doube entries style most accountants will prefer (you cant "create" cash it has to come from somewhere, same for expenditures...)

Anyways, give KMM a try..

http://kmymoney2.sourceforge.net/index-home.html

I use Gnucash. I know nothing about money (except how to spend it) and I'm the sort of person who discards the annual accounts of my flat's management company on the basis that my next-door neighbour will have read them and he's a CEO! Nevertheless, I managed to set up Gnucash and to use it to keep track of my accounts.

I think it boils down to personal taste and personal needs. It's more work, but if you try setting up both you'll end up satisfied that you made the right choice.

I use GnuCash and have tried KmyMoney as well.

As an ex accountant I have opted for the GnuCash as it supports double entries.

Up to today only found as a snitch that I cannot create opening balance accounts from where to feed the accounts but which are not included in balance or revenue sheets. Forces me to first close the old year before opening a new one. (I do bookkeeping by the year - no automatic transfer)

Does the job for a small business and private accounting.

I used quicken for 19 years (upgraded each year), till several months ago. It is frustrating to try to convert quicken data to gnucash, it can be done but will likely require considerable fine-tuning and corrections, and if there is lots of data, it will take a very long time (try converting 19 years worth of mutual fund deposits and distributions!). Depending on your needs, you may consider just starting over in gnucash -- once I made that decision, it was easy to have quicken determine the account balances etc that I used to set up gnucash. Once you get used to the idea of double entry book keeping, gnucash works like a charm. I've not yet figured out how to set up gnucash to properly import financial data from my bank and brokerage accounts, but I find manual entry to not be as difficult as I had feared -- and it is probably better in the long run, because I'm forced to understand exactly what I'm doing at each step of the way so little bits of financial weirdness don't get lost in the process. The reports generated by gnucash are not as extensive or 'pretty' as those from quicken, and the 'search' function in gnucash seems lame -- but overall I'm happy with the change. I kept a windows partition on my computers from 1997 till now just so I could run quicken. I tried to run quicken in wine several years ago, it actually did work (for some time), but when I encountered the inevitable problems it was hard to get any help -- the bank and Intuit, once they realized I was running quicken under wine on linux, just blamed wine/linux and said that was not supported. So you are on your own.

When Intuit increased the price of Quicken Premier to $100 without adding any functionality, I drew the line! They milked their cash cow one time too many.

My sympathies. Exactly my concerns with Quicken. I have 20 years of financial data. I was making some progress at importing the data from Quicken into GnuCash, but something went wrong (my fault?) with Ubuntu 12.10; so had to repair my Ubuntu installation. I am now close to restarting my evaluation of GnuCash and KmyMoney.

I am, as you point out, considering starting "fresh" with 2013. I was able, on a test basis, to import security transactions, but it required a lot of manual interaction. I am also contemplating setting up an "archive" in GnuCash of the old Quicken data and import that data later into the "official" version when I am more familiar with how to do that.

I too have years of Quicken data under Win 7 that I want to migrate to Gnucash effective 1 Jan 2013. So far I have put in about 20 hours investigating/attempting the migration without getting there yet.

Some lessons learned:

Motivation. I use Quicken 10 which I will have to pay to upgrade in April if I want to keep on-line payments. I hate Intuit for making migration (e.g. to The Mint) so difficult and for the "crappy I grew like Topsy spaghetti code" product.

Data migration. Quicken export to QIF is the only way I found. I first set up accounts in GC and found that to be wasteful. Start a NEW file in GC and let GC guide you from the import data it finds in the QIF file. However this failed because GC matches each incoming Q transaction on Q Account and Q Category to get to two double entry transactions: one in a GC Account named after your Q Account, and another GC Account named after your Q Category/sub category. Lots of hand editing if you have lots of Q transactions with no category. Lots of moving around Accounts in GC to make a logical Account Tree. Conclusion: Forget migrating Q data. Start GC from scratch and import 12/31/2012 balances from Quicken.

Double Entry. I knew the concept and GC is an easy implementation of the concept. No problem there.

User interface. Excellent. The only issue to date is that I wanted to display the Memo field in Register View (think checkbook view). The 4 layout options seem to be static; no à la carte layout allowed that I can find.

One line payment/download. I love the Q Update button that goes on-line and posts any payments to my banks/credit cards and then downloads all current transactions in one swoop. In my case 6 on-line accounts at different institutions. I could not get GC to do this in test. This seems to be a new feature with no documentation and no help in the forums that I could find that was of any use. So back to QIF for download and back to each bank to set up payments (one off and recurring).

Other features. I haven't looked at Reporting, Reconciliation and other stuff. I'm sure there will be other questions/issues but I planning on lots more hours until April to finally make up my mind.

Thanks for your observations xbootnek. I ended up taking the weekend "off". Temporarily gave-up my computer addiction, watched movies, and spent time with with the family. Looks like it is pretty much a tie in terms of which product to use.

I have gone ahead and marked the thread solved. Pretty much a toss-up and an issue of personal preference as to which program to use.
I'll also be out of town this weekend, so another lost weekend. Darn those family commitments!!!

As one update, trying to import securities into KMyMoney seemed to be a bust. It was not directly the fault of KMyMoney. After several failed attempts I finally had the absolutely brilliant idea to open the QIF file with GEDIT. The QIF file had 60,000+ lines of stock price data!!! No wonder KMyMoney choked. I had even attempted to restrict Quicken to generating a QIF file for only a one moth period, but it still gave me 20 years worth of stock prices. Looks like I might need to restrict my import to only the past couple of years. My experimentation will continue, as time permits.

I hope that we will be able to exchange thoughts as things progress.

Steve.. any update?

Did you settle on KMM(KMyMoney) or GnuCash?

thanks

The thread is five years old now. I have gone with KMyMoney.

1 members found this post helpful.