When you work in GnuCash, you find that you have to keep several windows open at the same time. Also, you don't need the Summary Bar and Status Bar for now. You want to hide them to minimize clutter and free up screen real estate. It will also be convenient if the tabs have unique colors so that you can find them quickly and easily. Let us see how you can accomplish all that.
- From the menu, select Edit | Preferences. The GnuCash Preferences dialog will open. This is where you set most of your preferences.
- In the Windows tab in Toolbar Style, select Icons Only. Check Show close button on notebook tabs. Select Tab Position Left, as shown in the following screenshot:
- Click Close.
- While most of the settings are available in the Preferences dialog, some of the personalization has to be done from other menu items. In the View menu, uncheck Summary Bar and Status Bar.
- In the Account Tree window, right click on Checking Accounts and select Edit Account. Click on the long Account Color button. The Pick a Color dialog will open, as shown in the next screenshot. Click on the black line on the outer ring and drag around to a bright green color. Click and drag the small black circle in the inner triangle to make that green color darker.
- Click OK. Now you should see the GnuCash window personalized to your specific style of working and to your taste, as shown in the following screenshot:
Arranging your workspace to suit your working style, at a minimum, helps reduce distractions. And, at best, it can help improve your productivity. People have different approaches to arranging their workspace. Some get a good chair and arrange it in such a way that they can sit for hours without pain or discomfort. Others play relaxing music. Some add a lush green indoor plant in their office while others need a whiteboard for outlining their thoughts.
In the same way, you can customize and personalize GnuCash to suit your working style.
Note
The Edit | Preferences settings are applicable per user. If you have more than one GnuCash application, the selections you make here will apply to all of those applications. However, if you have another user, your business partner or an associate, even though they may be working on the same application, they can have their own preference settings.
While most of these settings are accessible from the Preferences dialog, there are others that can be changed from other menu items.
Note
GnuCash is eager to act on your command. There is no OK button in the GnuCash Preferences dialog. As soon as you change a setting, you can see it take effect. When you are done, use the Close button to close the dialog.
Here are some of the preference settings and the result of that setting. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list of settings. This is intended to provide additional detail, where needed, beyond what is available in the pop-up tips. Feel free to try out various options to see how you can use these preferences to suit your working style.
Tip
What does a preference do?
For many preferences, you can pause the mouse over the preference setting in the GnuCash Preferences dialog and a pop-up tip will appear with details of what that setting will do.
|
Preference setting |
Result |
|---|---|
|
Start Date and End Date |
Many businesses in the US tend to have quarterly sales and other business targets. So, for much of the quarter, a setting of Start of this quarter and End of this quarter will work. Soon after the quarter has ended though, you will be doing a lot of catching up with the end of the quarter sales and expense postings as well as running reports. For example, at that time, you can change the settings to Start of previous quarter and End of previous quarter. |
|
Preference setting |
Result |
|---|---|
|
Tax Included (Invoices) |
Whether taxes are included by default in entries on invoices. This setting is inherited by new customers and vendors. |
|
Notify when due |
Lets you set whether you want to be notified when a bill will soon become due. |
|
Days in advance |
How many days in the future to warn about bills coming due. |
|
Tax Included (Bills) |
Whether tax is included by default in entries on bills. This setting is inherited by new customers and vendors. |
|
Preference Setting |
Result |
|---|---|
|
Display "tip of the Day" dialog |
You can turn off the option to display the Tip of the Day dialog on start-up. |
|
Show close button on notebook tabs |
Adds a small close icon on each tab, to make it easier to close the various tabs. |
|
Compress files |
This option determines whether the GnuCash data file will be compressed or not. If you have a large file, you can use this option to save space. |
|
Auto-save time interval |
You can set how often you want GnuCash to save changes. If you set this to zero, there will be no auto-save. |
|
Retain log files |
This option lets you select how long log files should be retained. You can choose Never, Forever, or For and then the number of days. |
|
Preference Setting |
Result |
|---|---|
|
QIF Import Show Documentation |
Shows more detailed help as you step through the QIF importer. |
|
Generic importer Use bayesian matching |
This option will let GnuCash learn new matching rules based on your manual mapping a transaction to an account. It applies to all importers except QIF. |
|
Match display threshold |
The minimal score a potential match must have to be displayed in the match list. Higher values will tighten the matching. |
|
Auto-add threshold |
A transaction whose best match's score is in the red zone (above the display threshold, but below or equal to Auto-add threshold) will be added by default. Please refer to the Electronic reconciliation section in Chapter 4, How Not To Get Lost in the Transactions Jungle. |
|
Auto-clear threshold |
A transaction whose best match's score is in the green zone (above or equal to Auto-clear threshold) will be cleared by default. Please refer to the Electronic reconciliation section in Chapter 4, How Not To Get Lost in the Transactions Jungle. |
|
Commercial ATM fees threshold |
If the ATM machine adds a small transaction fee, GnuCash will still be able to match it to the transaction, as long as the difference is below this threshold. For example, if you withdrew $100 from an ATM machine, you may have entered that amount in GnuCash. However, the bank will add the ATM transaction fee and show $103. If you set the ATM fees threshold at $3 or above, this will still be matched automatically and will not need your manual intervention. |
There are some other preferences that can be set elsewhere outside of the GnuCash Preferences dialog. We will cover those next.
In addition to the preferences you can set from the GnuCash Preferences dialog, as we saw in the tutorial, you can set a color to each account tab from the Edit Account dialog.
Note
In the Pick a Color dialog, click the eyedropper and click the color anywhere on your screen to select that color.
No, there is no way to set the color of the report tabs. They are destined to remain in the default gray color.
To resize columns in the Account Register window, you grab the border between the column headers with the mouse, click on it, and stretch the column to the size you want. However, the Description column is a tricky one. It is designed to always auto-fill to fit the window size. So, you cannot just reduce the size of the Description column because as soon as you let go it will then resize itself to fill the screen. If you want to reduce the size of the Description column, you should first stretch the other columns until the horizontal scrollbar appears. At this point, you will be able to reduce the Description column back to the full size of the window.
As we pointed out earlier, one of the major customizing features in GnuCash is to leave the windows that you need open when you exit GnuCash. When you launch GnuCash again, all of these windows will be recreated with any options and settings that you had selected.
As we showed in the tutorial, you can opt to show or hide the Summary Bar and the Status Bar from the View menu.
The Summary Bar displays balances for the opened account type at a glance. Usually accounts display today's account balance, any balance for future dates, a balance for cleared items, and a reconciled balance.
The Status Bar is very useful when you are not sure what a menu item does. When you open the menu and pause on the menu item, it displays more explanation about what that menu item does. It also shows a progress bar when opening or saving a GnuCash data file or generating reports.
- By default, GnuCash opens reports in the same window in a separate tab. How do you make reports open in a new window?
a. From the Reports menu.
b. From the Business menu.
c. From the GnuCash Preferences dialog Reports tab.
d. From the File menu.