GnuCash seems to be about 15 years behind the times when it comes to accounting software...
It should hook up to my bank account. It should take photos of my receipts, credit card statements and bank statements and automatically OCR them to add data. It should automatically calculate my taxes for a specific country, and file tax reports with local, state and federal government agencies online, and it should highlight things I might have missed to reduce my tax burden given my specific situation. It should compare my expenses with a typical person to highlight areas I might be able to make savings. It should have a mobile app which works even when offline and syncs later. It should have auto backups to the cloud or remote storage.
If I just wanted a way to add up my expenses by category, I would have used a spreadsheet.
I think GNUCash is in the Unix mode of "do one thing and do it very well". For me, that "thing" is enforcing double-entry accounting, although there are a couple other things that distinguish it from a spreadsheet for me.
I can see how you might want or expect a piece of software that handles everything, but in the GNU ecosystem, the traditional user-land pattern of use is to have many pieces of software, each of which does one thing, and to use them in turn as needed. This might place more cognitive burden on the user (vs. Windows), and also requires pieces of software you can start, use, and close quickly (again, vs. Windows, and GNUCash is a bit wanting in that regard...) but it also allows you more freedom and flexibility in doing your work.
So, instead of embiggening GNUCash, I would say that your desired actions would better be served by separate pieces of software:
- Bank hook-up: Something from your bank? This one is tough, as there is no widely-used open standard for manipulating your bank account over the internet, AFAIK, so you'd need bespoke software for your bank.
- OCR data ingest: Something like Ocrad with post-processing into a format GNUCash can use. Some lex/yacc wizard could probably do the latter part easily.
- Automatic tax calculation and burden reduction: A FOSS version of TurboTax? This is a good example of why the Unix philosophy is applicable, because my taxes in Canada are simple enough that I can handle them myself. I don't want a big tax-optimisation program tacked onto my bookkeeping software which I won't use.
- Expense comparison: I don't think closed-source accounting software does this, but GNUCash does allow you to make budgets. Collecting the budget for a "typical person" (of your country and lifestyle) is a little out of scope, and might be better served by a market research agency or something. Sadly, there will probably never be a GNU World Census.
- Mobile app and cloud storage: This one is a little tough. You want it to sync up between your mobile device and (presumably) desktop. You could host a Seafile or OwnCloud instance on your desktop, but I'm not sure if that would let you sync them up anywhere. iCloud-style storage would require server infrastructure, and that usually requires an organization running off profit or donations to host and maintain the infrastructure. IMHO, we don't really have a good answer for the issue of "who pays for the servers?" in FOSS. Anyway, we are getting beyond a software/GNUCash issue and into a hardware/infrastructure issue.
OFX is widely supported (but not universally). The UI leaves much to be desired.
> I don't want a big tax-optimisation program tacked onto my bookkeeping software which I won't use.
GNUCash generally does a good job of keeping things you don't use hidden or at least unobtrusive. Account reconciliation being one of them. IMO tax calculation is not a viable OSS tool, as it's country specific and changes rapidly. Ubuntu ships 18.04 at the end of April. Do you want to file using tax software from July 2017?
> Mobile app and cloud storage: This one is a little tough. You want it to sync up between your mobile device and (presumably) desktop.
GNUCash specifically has problems here. The code base assumes single user transactions and concurrent modification is unsupported. I use a psql database for cloud storage, but if I lose network connection I get a dialog about someone else using the books and have to discard the stale lock. This is problem whether using files or SQL, although SQL is at least a solid backend to some day support it, while filesync solutions would be pretty much a fail.
> IMHO, we don't really have a good answer for the issue of "who pays for the servers?" in FOSS
IMO, we do: the users. There's no reason you can't charge people for a username / password, although, when hosting financial data the liability could get painful.
Does this scan receipts with OCR and connect them to the credit card charges?
I just want something that will do a better job at giving me a good look at my budget than mint but that doesn't require a serious time investment. I willing to pay with money instead of time.
Mint doesn't do nearly any of the things he claims (and definitely not well), I use it daily and have been looking for a good replacement for over a year now.
Do TurboTax and Quickbooks sync so that I can quickly add taxable transactions?
> If I just wanted a way to add up my expenses by category, I would have used a spreadsheet.
Um, have you ever actually done this with accounting data? It becomes a tangled, shitty mess. The formulas used to calculate everything become larger and larger, and the data needs constant casting from text back to numbers.
> It should automatically calculate my taxes for a specific country
It should automatically manage your stock portfolio and give you 26% yearly returns, and it should give you daily backrubs as well.
> It should have auto backups to the cloud or remote storage.
It does! Google drive, Dropbox, Seafile, etc etc.
> It should have a mobile app which works even when offline and syncs later.
"It should automatically calculate my taxes for a specific country, and file tax reports with local, state and federal government agencies online, and it should highlight things I might have missed to reduce my tax burden given my specific situation."
Unfortunately, GnuCash's lobbying and political action budget is significantly more limited than [Intuit]'s.
It should hook up to my bank account. It should take photos of my receipts, credit card statements and bank statements and automatically OCR them to add data. It should automatically calculate my taxes for a specific country, and file tax reports with local, state and federal government agencies online, and it should highlight things I might have missed to reduce my tax burden given my specific situation. It should compare my expenses with a typical person to highlight areas I might be able to make savings. It should have a mobile app which works even when offline and syncs later. It should have auto backups to the cloud or remote storage.
If I just wanted a way to add up my expenses by category, I would have used a spreadsheet.