Hi there! Welcome to GnuCash 1.6, an easy-to-use, powerful, and reliable personal finance program. This virtually all-new version has an extensive list of features, and if you want to know everything GnuCash can do, check the features section of this manual. However, if you're like us and impatient to get some work done, that can wait until later.
As much as is possible, GnuCash is designed to be intuitive to use. Despite that, getting the most out of GnuCash requires understanding a couple of simple ideas used throughout the program, and used throughout the rest of this manual. Therefore, we highly recommend that you spend a few minutes reading this manual page.
At its core, GnuCash is a tool for tracking transactions. A transaction is a record of money being removed from one "account" and placed in another. To take a simple example, say you have two bank accounts - a cheque account (that's checking, for the Americans in the audience . . .), and an investment account, and you transfer $500 from the cheque account to the investment account. GnuCash records that transfer.
"But what about when I buy things, or get paid?" I hear you ask. Well, "accounts" in GnuCash aren't just bank accounts. You can set up Income accounts, expense accounts, asset, liability, share accounts, mutual fund accounts - in fact, there are a total of 11 different account types GnuCash supports. You can (and should) set up a number of different expense accounts for different types of expenditure. So, your paycheck would be a transfer from, say "salary", an income account, to your checking account. Buying fuel with your credit card might be a transfer from "ABC Visa", a credit card account, to "Fuel", an expense account. If you've grasped all that, you're 90% of the way to making best use of GnuCash!
Now, if you're going to keep proper track of your finances, you'll obviously want to create a variety of expense and income accounts for keeping track of various transactions you'll make - in fact, setting up the right set of accounts is the key to making GnuCash work for you. However, if you create many different accounts, it can be a pain to keep track of them all. GnuCash has a way of dealing with this, though. It lets you create a treeof accounts. For instance, you can create a "Utilities" expense account, and then create "Utilities:Power", "Utilities:Gas", and "Utilities:Phone". We term "Utilities" to be the "parent" account, and the three others to be "subaccounts". When you produce reports of your financial data, you can choose whether to display a summary of all "utilities" accounts, or data for each individual account.
Now let's go create some accounts!
This section is intended for people who are using a personal finance program for the first time, or can't import their data into GnuCash using the QIF importer.
If you want, GnuCash can help set up a default set of accounts for you, using the "New Account Setup" druid. What's a druid? Well, it's kind of like a wizard, but it's called a druid. Why? Because it's not a wizard, it's a druid . . .
Anyway, the druid will take you through the process of creating a set of accounts to get you going. Simply follow the prompts to select a default currency, then select the types of accounts you wish to create. You will then be given the opportunity to enter opening balances for these accounts. Now, here's where things get a little tricky. The opening balances are just a transaction, but where is it transferred from? A special account of type "equity" is created, called "Opening Balances", and all opening balances consist of a transfer to (or from) this account.
If you have used another personal finance program that can export QIF files, such as Quicken or Microsoft Money, you can import the data into GnuCash. See the instructions for the QIF importer.
Once you've done that, you're ready to go - but first, couple of quick hints about two things GnuCash does a little differently from those programs:
Where some programs uses "categories" to categorize expenses and income types, GnuCash uses income and expense accounts. They work in a similar way, but it's a considerably cleaner and more flexible way of handling things once you get used to the idea.
Some programs use a list of accounts. GnuCash uses a "tree" of accounts, allowing you to group similar sorts of accounts - very useful when reporting your financial data. You can rearrange your accounts to use a more tree-like structure by using the Account Edit Dialog.
Once the druid has done it's thing, you'll end up at the GnuCash main window. To start entering transactions, select the appropriate account and click on the "open" button on the the toolbar. This brings up the account's register, so you can enter transactions. You might also want to add more accounts or change something about existing accounts.
Please take the time to read some more about GnuCash in this online manual. You'll get much more out of it!