The end of the accounting search

The system used until now — QuickBooks — was a legacy from the beginnings of the company in 1997. It has long exhibited a full litany of the sorts of misbehaviors endemic to proprietary systems. Regular (paid) updates were forced, despite the fact that new versions brought little in the way of new capabilities. Crashes were frequent; QuickBooks users know to make backups every few minutes to avoid losing work. The software had arbitrary limits meant to force "upgrades" to the "enterprise" version. More recently, Intuit has discontinued support for the desktop version entirely in an effort to force all users to its online, paid-by-the-month service.

Enough was finally enough; your editor took some time to go back and review the various systems that had been considered in the past. It turned out that the scripts developed to pry data out of QuickBooks still worked — at least, after a somewhat belated update to Python 3. In the end, the option that won out was GnuCash.

How the decision was made

There is a wealth of free accounting systems available for Linux systems. Many of them are highly complex and solve a much bigger problem; they include features like inventory tracking, customer-relation management, and more. Such systems are unwieldy to work with and difficult to get started with. In truth, many of them appear to have been developed as platforms for consulting businesses, though surely nobody would deliberately make their software complex and tricky just to motivate clients to purchase their services. LWN prefers to not spend its hard-earned pennies that way, and has no need for all of that complexity, so those systems were dropped from consideration early on.

At the other end, there are a number of accounting systems that are based on plain-text files and an associated set of programs. These systems are much easier to work with and are adaptable to most needs. Such a system could have been made to work for LWN, but they tend to lack some useful features. Check writing and report generation, for example, tend not to be well supported. The user interface for many operations is a text editor; this is often seen as an advantage, but it becomes less so as the number of transactions grows. There are advantages to a graphical interface designed for the job at hand.

GnuCash is not a perfect program by any means, but it does provide the accounting features that LWN needs, along with a reasonable graphical interface and a minimum of extra complexity.

The 2017 restart included a number of requirements that any new accounting system had to meet:

• Importing and exporting of data had to be doable — and relatively straightforward. Getting our QuickBooks data into GnuCash took a bit of scripting using the capable (if poorly documented) Python bindings. Another set of scripts has since been written to import data from the site and from our bank account. GnuCash has a reasonably capable import mechanism for the data formats exported by banks, complete with a Bayesian system to assign transactions to accounts, but a bit of scripting makes the process quicker yet.
• Basic accounting operations needed to be simple, and indeed they are.
• The generation of forms for our legal reporting requirements was on the list. GnuCash has some features to handle this, though not for US forms. In the end, this is a task that we now simply hand off to our accountant, who handles it with our annual taxes. A related requirement is check printing, which is important for a business to be able to do; more on that below.
• Ease of integration with the rest of LWN's operation was mentioned above; the Python bindings make most things fairly easy to do.
• The last requirement had to do with the future longevity of the system — how healthy is its community? The GnuCash project, having started in 1997, is slightly older than LWN; it is still here a quarter-century later and still making releases. GnuCash probably will not go away anytime soon. That said, its development community is smaller than one might like, and progress is not rapid.

All told, the requirements listed all those years ago have been met well enough for the change to be made.

Some further impressions

There are a number of aspects of GnuCash that seem not quite finished. For example, it has had the ability to use an SQL database (PostgreSQL, MySQL, or SQLite) for many years, but the native XML format is still described as "the most stable and established" and recommended for most users. Storing data in PostgreSQL does work, and startup time is marginally faster when using it. Sadly, multi-user access is not supported, even when using PostgreSQL. Another example is the reconciliation process, which doesn't remember what the previous reconciled value was and, instead, makes up something strange.

GnuCash has a report-generation mechanism that has clearly had a lot of effort put into it; the system is designed to be extensible by end users. The unfortunate part is that the extension language is Scheme, and it is, for the most part, undocumented. Scheme looks like Lisp but isn't really Lisp; the number of people who know it well is sure to be small. The prospect of creating a new report for GnuCash (or improving an existing one) can be a bit daunting; see the implementation of a balance sheet for an example. Your editor, in the end, found it easier to just create new reports outside of GnuCash in Python.

The ability to print checks has always been on the list. Even in the US, we write far fewer checks than we once did, but the need still does come up. GnuCash has that ability, and it can be made to work with just about any check format. The language used to add a new check format is rudimentary, but it gets the job done in the end. One annoying feature of GnuCash's check printing is that address information must be entered every time a check is printed, even if the recipient's address is stored as, for example, a vendor in GnuCash.

The biggest thing we lose in this move is the ability to export data in a format that our accountant can read directly into his proprietary tax-preparation system. He is willing to work with us, though, and believes that the reports generated from GnuCash will be enough to get the job done without a lot of additional effort (and expense). Perhaps he, too, is tired of hearing your editor's complaints about QuickBooks for all these years is prepared to do almost anything to be done with that.

In the end, GnuCash is good enough to do what LWN needs it to do. It is a nice feeling to have gotten rid of the one proprietary program used in LWN's operations, and to have better control over our accounting data. The new system is working well enough that your editor is kicking himself for having waited so long to commit to the change.