Balancing my check account

Posted Sep 15, 2005 7:19 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524)
In reply to: Balancing my check account by NAR
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)

Sure. But thats not the entire (or even the main) point of using an application like Gnucash.

The point is, to be able to make wise decisions about your finances, the first needed step is to *know* what your finances actually are. This doesn't mean only how much money you have, and how much you spent, but also what you spent it on.

Using Gnucash I can easily and quickly answer questions like:

How much did I spend in total for having a car this year, included deprecation, insurance, repairs, petrol etc ?
How much did that vacation in Cypern back 2 years ago actually cost ?
How have my stock, on average developed this year ?
Where did all the money actually go ?
Do we tend to have higher expenses in certain months ? If so, how much higher ?

Sure, you can answer all of those without a personal finance program, but it gets complicated and tedious. Especially when you, for example, own stock on an exchange where courses are given in norwegian-krone, pay fees associated with that to a brokerage wanting british-pound, live in and have most of your transactions in Euros.