Software Update: GnuCash 3.0

Version 3.0 of GnuCash has been released. GnuCash is a cross platform and open source accounting program for individuals and small businesses. It uses the double-entry bookkeeping system and is able to easily keep track of, for example, bank accounts, investments, income and expenses, budgets, mortgages and loans and can of course create reports and graphs. The following changes and improvements have been made in this release:

GnuCash 3.0 released

The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 3.0, the first release in our new 3.x stable series.

New Features for Users:

• The headline item for this release is that GnuCash now uses the Gtk+-3.0 Toolkit and the WebKit2Gtk API. This change was forced on us by some major Linux distributions dropping support for the WebKit1 API. Unfortunately the Webkit project doesn’t support Microsoft Windows so that platform will continue to use the WebKit1 API, though with Gtk3. We’ve selected Gtk+-3.14.0 as the minimum version because it fully supports CSS theming.
• New editors to remove outdated or incorrect match data from the import maps, a new user interfaces for managing files associated with transactions, an improved facility for removing old prices from the price database, and a way to remove deleted files from the history list in the file menu.
• New Reports: A Reconciliation Report based on the Transaction Report,a Income GST Report, and a Cashflow Barchart report.
• A new CSV importer largely rewritten in C++, adding new features including the ability to re-import CSV files exported from GnuCash, along with a separate CSV price importer.
• A new preference panel for the Alphavantage API key so that Finance::Quote users need not edit /etc/gnucash/environment. We’ve removed all references to the various Yahoo! quote sources and made Alphavantage the default.
• Data file directories are now located appropriately to the operating system’s conventions by default:
  • Windows: CSIDL_APPDATA/Gnucash
  • MacOS: $HOME/Application Support/Gnucash
  • Linux: $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/gnucash (or the default $HOME/.config/gnucash)
• It’s still possible to overried with the environment variable GNC_DOC_PATH, which replaces GNC_DOT_DIR in earlier versions of GnuCash.
• Accounts in the Bayes import map are now linked by GUID instead of names so that the matcher won’t have to be retrained if you rename an account. The Bayesian import maps are also stored in a flatter structure to allow faster access, especially in SQL. These changes mean that if you have Bayesian mapping data, once converted your database will be loadable only by GnuCash 2.6.20 and later.
• MySQL and SQLite3 date storage has changed a bit. Once converted, MySQL and SQLite3 database will be loadable only by GnuCash 2.6.19 and later.
• Numerics are rewritten to allow for more significant digits. The old 6-digit-maximum fraction is now 9-digits, and prices may have up to 18 digit precision.
• Chart Reports appearance is improved, including more modern chart colors as suggested by
• Transaction Report improvements, including regular expression filtering and many more options and features including a “Subtotal Summary Grid” The subtotal summary-grid will tabulate subtotals – prime-sortkey vertically, sec-sortkey horizontally. For example, with prime-sortkey = accounts, sec-sortkey = date, sec-subtotal = monthly will produce a monthly time series table.
• The About dialog box layout is improved and now includes the detected Finance::Quote version.
• GnuCash will always build the locale-specific tax modules. This was optional when building with autotools and never enabled when building with cmake. Note that the only supported tax locales are en_US and de_DE. On Macs the Reconcile Window’s menu moved to the menubar.
• GnuCash no longer supports Guile-1.8 and now does support Guile-2.2

New Features for Developers:

• Several parts of the engine and the SQL backend are rewritten in C++, an effort that will continue in the next development cycle. KVP is now private to libgncmod-engine and accessible outside via qof_instance_set and qof_instance_get. KVP and GUID are reimplemnted in C++ using boost::variant and boost::UUID respectively.
• C++ unit tests require GoogleTest. While it’s possible to use prebuilt libgtest and libgmock on some distros, building static libraries for GnuCash is preferred. It may be necessary to provide the paths to the googletest and googlemock source with CMake parameters GTEST_ROOT and GMOCK_ROOT respectively.
• The date implementation is migrated to boost::date-time, replacing a Glib GDateTime implementation. This makes the earliest date recordable 1 January 1400CE instead of 1 January 1CE. We doubt any users will be affected.
• We’ve reorganized the code into a core library directory, libgnucash, and application-specific directory, gnucash. The python bindings are now in a top-level directory, bindings; code pinched from other projects is in borrowed, the account templates, check templates, and pixmaps are consolidated in data, and common holds the cmake modules and test framework code. The bin directory’s contents have moved to the top level gnucash directory and bin is removed. There are now directories for gschema, gtkbuilder and ui files directly in gnucash. In principle all files of each type should go into these global directories. The only exception is if such a file belongs to an optional module. In that case the file remains located inside that module’s directory. Currently we have ui, glade and gschema file exceptions in aqb and ofx importers.
• The build system is changed from Autotools to CMake. All options except python bindings and the python console demo are enabled by default. Highly parallel builds with Ninja are possible and recommended, except on Microsoft Windows. The Windows build system is rewritten to use MSYS2, Mingw-w64, Powershell, and jhbuild.
• Add a “pot” target to the build system so that translators can easily generate a new gnucash.pot from a git repository.
• detect presence or absence of libxml2 and makeinfo during configuration; abort if the first is missing and don’t build the (mostly obsolete) texinfo documentation if the latter is. Document both in README.dependencies.
• Replaced Timespec with time64 in the Scheme and Python bindings, introducing many new C time64 functions to accommodate the replacement. Timespec will eventually be removed from the C API as well.
• Some cruft removal in libgnucash/scm plus moving some code to its only use location. “main.scm” has been renamed to “utilities.scm”.
• The “printf” family of Scheme custom functions is replaced with the built-in “format” facility.
• Change a generally unnecessary warning about being unable to open a module (usually because the file is still being created) to a debug message. It appears mostly during highly parallel builds and was distracting.
• Appstream configuration is updated to the latest spec.
• Added two functions to the Scheme option API:
  • gnc:option-make-internal! will hide an existing option. eg a derived report can set the value for a Display/* option and hide it from the user.
  • gnc:unregister option will unregister option. This is primarily useful for derived options eg another report copies from transaction.scm and removes some options and recreates them with different parameters.
• For example, unregister existing option from section “Accounts” name “Accounts”, and recreate with different parameters eg limited account types.
• Drop intltool in favor or using modern gettext. By default we require gettext 0.19.6 as this is needed to generate a translated version of gnucash.desktop and gnucash.appdata.xml. For platforms where this isn’t available, setting ALLOW_OLD_GETTEXT=ON will allow building but some strings will not be extracted to gnucash.pot
• Pass GTEST_ROOT and GMOCK_ROOT through to distcheck. So that they don’t have to be exported in the environment if they’re needed.
• The Python Bindings and Console are now for Python 3, and enabled to expose more GnuCash API. Compilation of GLib Schemas during build and installation can be disabled by setting -DCOMPILE_GSCHEMAS=OFF. This is intended *only* for distribution packaging scripts that run glib-compile-schemas themselves. Otherwise note that if you install to a DESTDIR you’ll need to re-run glib-compile-scemas after moving the contents of $DESTDIR$PREFIX/share/glib-2.0/schemas to $PREFIX.
• The CuteCash front end has been removed. The code we need from GOffice has been brought into the GnuCash code base so GOffice is no longer a dependency. The register drawing code has been upgraded to draw directly on a cairo surface, removing the dependency on libgnomecanvas.
• GnuCash 3.0 adds the following dependencies: Boost, ICU, Googletest.

Known Problems

There’s no such thing as bug-free software and if we held the release until all the bugs were fixed we’d never release anything. Here are the open bugs particular to GnuCash 3.0 at the time of this release:

• It is not possible to overwrite SQL Databases from within GnuCash, even though GnuCash will ask if you want to. Bug 789594.
• There is no theming tool for Windows or Macs so users of those platforms must apply theming by hand. Bug 791823.
• Accounting Period dates are subject to change with time zone and daylight-time changes. Bug 791825.
• Opening a large SQL database on Windows is very slow on some machines, merely slow on others. Bugs 792105, 794482.
• Some HBCI information is not loaded correctly so the first transaction download will re-retrieve transactions unless the beginning date is set explicitly. Bug 792397.
• The new CSV importer’s Price of Shares column doesn’t work. Bug 793306.
• Importing an OFX file on Windows fails with an empty matcher window. Bug 793461.
• The Bayes account matcher can take a long time to convert the accounts from name string to guides. This is a one-off, happening only the first time one imports into an account on GnuCash 3.0. Bug 794334.
• The new CSV importer’s numeric parser can’t parse numbers of the form x + y/z. Bug 793556.
• Python bindings may not work in some installations because the bindings are unable to find the backend modules (libgncmod-backend-dbi and libgncmod-backend-xml). Bug 794526.
• Get Quotes can be slow if one has a large number of saved prices. Bug 794644.
• Some users see 1 January 1970 instead of the default date in the New Invoice or New Bill dialog and on the unposted bill and invoice. Bug 794767.
• The Mac localization code can set the wrong encoding for strftime causing the register’s date picker to label months “Null” in some locales. Bug 794807.
• On Mac, the File Open dialog will crash if one types anything. Bug 794809.
• An open register is not immediately updated when the Since Last Run dialog creates transaction splits in the register’s account. Bug 794854.
• GnuCash asks if one wants to save changes when quitting or opening a file even if there’s no book open. Bug 794870.
• The Online Actions menu includes some obsolete and non-functional selections. Bug 794880.
• The list doesn’t include the many bugs carried over from previous versions. For a complete list of bugs search for the product Gnucash at Gnome Bugzilla