I recently received an inquiry here from a reader interested in using GnuCash to track his student loan. Here is the text of that email:

Can you help with tracking student loans in GnuCash?

Every month when I pay my student loan I credit my Bank Account for the payment amount $100 I then debit the Loan payment Expense account for the same $100. But how can I track and reflect how much of my Liability has been covered and how much Education Liability i still have to be paid?

Thank you so much once again for your great blog!

Well first off, thanks for the compliment on the blog. (You know I just couldn't cut that part off the end of his message.)

Today I have a GnuCash tip for you which will clearly demonstrate GnuCash at its finest.

I always frustrated when I wanted to find a particular transaction in Microsoft Money or Intuit's Quicken. Neither of them had the flexibility to take what I knew about a transaction and use that information to pinpoint the transaction or transactions I wanted. I particularly disliked Microsoft's implementation. Microsoft Money's Find Transaction function was so lame I avoided using it entirely.

To find a transaction in GnuCash, just hit Crtl-F. You don't have to be in any particular location in the program. You can find any transaction from anywhere you want to start looking. Another way to get the Find Transaction dialog is to choose Edit, and then Find from the main menu. You get this dialog box:

This morning I awoke to a notice of a new release of GnuCash free personal financial management software. Version 2.2.1 of GnuCash is a bug fix release to the stable release version, 2.2.0. Anyone who wants immediate relief from any of the bugs listed below should go to the GnuCash site and download the new version.

The windows version can be found here, already compiled and ready to install and run. For everyone else, GnuCash 2.2.1 source code can be downloaded here.

Some of the bugs fixed in the new version are:

A question which seems to come up very frequently among new GnuCash users is how to create custom reports. Maybe you've created your own, highly customized version of one of GnuCash's standard reports. Or maybe you've just been exploring the menus and found there are no custom reports listed in your fresh GnuCash installation. Either way the answer might not be obvious.

I can promise you though, it's simple. Here's how:

Today I have a GnuCash tip that you're sure to love because it's so simple and easy to use. You'll especially appreciate this one if you're new to the idea of managing your personal finances on a computer, but maybe even more so if you're coming to GnuCash from Microsoft Money or Intuit Quicken.

As you come to use and appreciate the power of GnuCash, you'll begin to discover for yourself how you really prefer to classify and categorize the various aspects of your own personal financial picture. When you first set up your accounts structure in GnuCash, you might have made some arbitrary decisions about where accounts should go. As you've become more proficient in using GnuCash, you may now understand this first set of account organization decisions could have been better.

As I was writing my GnuCash tip about using the hidden account feature to tuck your closed out stock positions away until you need them later, I realized I had accumulated a good number of closed positions this year already. The list had gotten fairly long. The first thing I wanted to do was what 90% of us want to do when we encounter a long list. I wanted to sort it.

Sorting in GnuCash is accomplished by the most intuitive means we've all come to understand well. Just click on the column heading and your list will be sorted by whatever field that column heading represents.

Today I have a really simple GnuCash tip which saves me a lot of time, effort and screen real estate. I've solved the problem of what to do with closed positions in GnuCash.

The problem I'm referring to stems from the fact that any security you might invest in, whether it be stocks, bonds, mutual funds or what have you, results in the creation of a GnuCash account. This is because by definition anything which money flows into or out of is known as an account.

When you invest in a new stock, something you've never owned before, money flows out of your cash account and into the account representing the security purchased. Conversely, when you sell that security money flows out of the security's account and into a cash account.

Over the weekend GnuCash devlopers announced that version 2.2.0 of GnuCash, was officially released. GnuCash had previously been available in a development release for Windows. Now, for the first time, GnuCash Open Source Software for personal financial accounting is available for Microsoft Windows in a stable release intended for every user.

In addition to the Windows release, GnuCash also runs on Unix and Mac OSX operating system platforms.

For GnuCash version 2.2.0, developers focused on releasing highly stable code suitable for all users, not just those users interested in testing a so-called beta release. With the focus on stability rather than features, there are only a couple of interesting new features users will notice in version 2.2.0.

As I was paying my bills this weekend, I started to wonder what effect rising gas prices had had on my businesses. We track transportation costs for three principal things here: personal use, business use and volunteer use. Transportation costs for personal use are not tax deductible. Business and charitable uses are deductible, but in different ways. I wanted to create a report to break down actual costs between these three usage modes to get a snapshot on taxes this year. GnuCash is a terrific tool for generating just these kinds of highly specific reports.

All I needed to do was to select Edit | Find from the main GnuCash accounts screen. That combination brings up one of the most simple to use, yet most powerful, tools in the GnuCash toolbox. The GnuCash find transaction dialog is shown here.

Here's a quick time saver for entering transactions in GnuCash. It's the most efficient way I've found to get the exact account you want when you're entering a new transaction.

Suppose you're recording a transaction for a recent trip to the grocery store. Your account structure in GnuCash, for the relevant accounts, looks like this:

• Assets
  • Cash
    • Checking
• Expenses
  • Groceries