GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 451215
General Usability Comments
Last modified: 2018-06-29 21:40:44 UTC
I am currently evaluating GnuCash against an old copy of Quicken running in Windows. My interest is to monitor and control my personal finances. Whilst my experience with GnuCash is mainly positive there are certain areas of functionality where I believe it is lacking. 1. The search function. For a personal user this seemingly minor facility is very important. Say the kettle blows up and you want to track when you bought it to find out if it is still in warranty. The search function forces you to specify what database field to search; you may not know what account it was posted to only that somewhere in the text was "kettle". A "search all fields" function would be very powerful, which is indeed a facility I have had need to use many times in Quicken. 2. Entering a split in the register. This is my biggest bugbear. The split function is something I use frequently for recording credit card transactions. The display should not show "Total Deposit" and "Total Withdrawal", this is misleading to the non accountant; it is a receipt against splits or a payment against splits (or analysed expenses / income , whatever you want to call it). If you want to aim this at personal finance users you need to keep the references to double entry bookkeeping under the surface. Other information:
Martin, can you please file these as separate items? Perhaps for the first with a title of "simple search over all fields". I think that should be our default search, with an "[Advanced...]" button leading to the existing one. As for the second point, I'm not sure that I agree... "Deposit" and "Withdrawl" are terms used in Asset/Bank account registers; in my Credit Card (Liability) register, the columns are "Payment" and "Charge", which make sense ... which register (for which account) are you in? We presently do take care to use "friendly" labels based on the type of the account, as per (a). See the {Edit > Preferences > Accounts > Labels > Use formal accounting labels} option if you really want to be annoyed. ;) In any case, "Deposit" and "Withdrawl" are probably the most accessible terms for these columns ... they're what every bank uses for transactions in/out of asset accounts. I don't have any idea what "{receipt,payment} against splits" means ... I think it's more confusing than the text that's there now. How is it "against" the split? Also, what are "analyzed expenses/income"?
(In reply to comment #1) > We presently do take care to use "friendly" labels based on the type of the > account, as per (a). See the {Edit > Preferences > Accounts > Labels > Use Sorry... "as per the previous paragraph".
Jsled, are you sure about the severity and priority?
(In reply to comment #3) > Jsled, are you sure about the severity and priority? No, I didn't even notice... Martin, please review <http://bugzilla.gnome.org/page.cgi?id=bug-status.html#severity> for the semantics of these fields. This is not "high"-priority, and definitely not "critical"-severity.
No offense intended, but this happened while filing comment 2, maybe when reloading the tab :-) Back to the topic...
Oh, whoops. That was my bad, of course. I think I clicked on one of the javascript predefined states like "stacktrace + crasher" or whatever.
I will enter #2 as a separate item
(In reply to comment #7) > I will enter #2 as a separate item Obviously done as bug#451515; however, you should have included the full (relevant) discussion so that we don't have to repeat this all over again :-( As for your first item: Could you please file a new item on that one? Then close this bug here.
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