GnuCash is accounting software that’s been around for decades, and to some extent feels like it. I experimented with moving my personal accounting records to use GnuCash.

On the plus side GnuCash has an open data format, it can hold its data as XML which has an understandable structure. The data is accessible both for reporting out, and for manipulation by scripts. So there’s no lock-in, it’s possible to export data from GnuCash into another package.

GnuCash is free software. Most other accounting software is subscription based. I am retired and wish to minimise how much I spend. There is a lot of functionality in GnuCash.

On the negative side (which eventually meant I decided not to move to GnuCash) categorising transactions would require running script over the internal data. You can’t see two accounts together at the same data. Editing is cumbersome compared with my homebrew solution which has a HTML based editor.