Gnucash file structure update#
Gnucash file structure download#

I went back to the last comprehensive financial snapshot that I trusted, i.e. Note that the GnuCash string form of a uuid has no '-' characters, so in mysql, I use replace(uuid(), '-', ''). Using guuids instead of integers for primary keys is somewhat novel but works OK. I was pleased to find that SQL support in GnuCash had matured as of the Dec 2010 release of version 2,4, and the SQL structure that gnucash uses is quite straightforward: accounts, transactions, splits, etc. I went into mad mode over the holiday break, first exploring a greasemonkey Mint: I want my data back They promise not to, but to say they (or anyone who hacks their system) cannot move funds is just a lie. They could do anything I could do at my bank web site.

Gnucash file structure download#

They had my bank passwords to download transaction data. You can organize and analyze your finances, but you can't move funds between–or out of–any account using Mint. I was willing to risk giving them my bank passwords, since I audit everything pretty carefully, but their security story is a boldface lie: Mint has a notes field, but won't let you search them and trains you not to use them by deleting your work if you change any other field in the transaction. 'Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.' - Eisenhower But on Dec 1st, Mint will no longer let you re-allocate budget funds between November and later months. On November 31, you don't have all your spending info for November, since transaction data takes a few days to flow through banks and credit card systems. No longer term planning, and no retrospective changes to the budget. You can only budget for the current month.

I had to resort to a Google docs spreadsheet to make up for limitations of Mint's budgeting. And once you have split a transaction, you can no longer search for the transaction by the total. The UI for splitting transactions is incredibly tedious. I know this because I carefully exported all my transactions in CSV format after each significant session and reviewed the diffs before checking them in to a version control repository. And sometimes, Mint just spontaneously threw away my work and changed the categories anyway. And since they lack support for any sort of transaction reconciliation, I had to cobble together something out of their tags to keep track of which transactions I had already reviewed. So I had to double-check the categorization.

The point, though, is hardly anyone seems to have looked.) (To be defensive for just a moment, their data accuracy - how well they automatically edited - was really low, and anyone who looked deeply into their data at Mint, especially in the beginning, was shocked at how inaccurate it was. Their approach completely kicked our approach's ass. I was focused on trying to make the usability of editing data as easy and functional as it could be Mint was focused on making it so you never had to do that at all. As to the idea that Mint's categorization would save me work, Marc Hedlund put it this way in Why Wesabe Lost to Mint: It relies on the user to notice duplicate transactions, so it's unreliable for budgeting. Mint fails to download a few credit card transactions on occasion, so it's unreliable auditing. You might think that the old balance + income - expenses = new balance. It will give you a balance for your bank account at the beginning of each month and a list of income and expenses in between. Mint has no concept whatsoever of double-entry accounting.

Gnucash file structure update#

And while Wine continues to support Quicken 2001 after all this time, I don't have any API to update Quicken's store. So there's no going back to Quicken after Mint. I stopped paying for updates after Quicken 2001 and hence lost bank syncing. But I did find a flat-file serialization suitable for use with version control (and no, QIF doesn't cut it. While GnuCash's UI isn't as nice as modern web apps, it lets me keep my data in SQL, which keeps my options open.īefore Mint, I used Quicken for decades. allowing access from any machine with a web browserĪfter trying Mint for a year and a half, I realized that while Web integration is nice, it's no good without double-entry integrity.a flat-file serialization of the data suitable for use with version control.support double-entry accounting, with budgeting, reports, and charts.My ideal personal accounting system would Got my data back from Mint, thanks to GnuCash/mysql