When I realized Gnome Bugzilla passed the 600 000th bug mark, I went to see which project got the “honours”.  Turns out GnuCash is the big winner!   I had never started GnuCash before and I though it was a good moment to try it!

First of all, the learning curve is high.  That’s to be expected, after all GnuCash is a complete accounting application. While the UI is quite simple and lean, there’s terminology and procedures to learn. That where the documentation comes handy.

The documentation covers many topics: terminology, accounting principles and howtos for many specific uses.  In about 2 hours, I was setup: I had setup my accounts (based on their very well localized presets: it even included Québec’s taxes and perceptions accounts), I had imported transactions from my bank account and credit cards.  Now if only Desjardins also provided retirement savings (RRSP) details in a computer readable format beside their brochure PDFs… I’ll have to wait ’till I get my detailed printed report (once every 3 months) before I can manually enter the data in GnuCash.

All in all, I’d like to kudo the GnuCash contributors.  Somehow I didn’t expect so much polish on a 12 years old application (and don’t get me wrong, but sometimes apps get stuck in time).  The ledger view comes with handy keyboard shortcuts designed to speed up data entry and I like it. Custom reports? that even more awesome.

I’ll submit some localization bugs (or request a fr_CA version) because somehow it looks like French and Québécois accountants didn’t agree on all the words (ie. conciliation).