Easy to Use Menus: GnuCash menus conform to the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines. This means that they are simple and similar in appearance to many other GNOME applications.

Documentation: GnuCash has built-in Help and extensive User’s Guide documentation.

Import Methods: GnuCash supports many ways to input transactions besides manual entry. If you can access your bank accounts on-line, this is especially useful, as most banks and credit card companies support one of the following import methods. You will spend less time entering data and more time analyzing results.

Reports: GnuCash comes with over 30 prebuilt reports, including Account Summary, Income, Expenses, Transaction Report, Balance Sheet, Profit&Loss, Portfolio Valuation, and many others. Reports support graphical views of the data, including pie charts, bar charts, and scatter plots. The reports can be exported to HTML files, and are easily customized.

Scheduled Transactions: GnuCash now has the ability to automatically create and enter transactions, or remind you when these transactions are due, giving you the choice of entering, postponing or removing the automated transaction.

Mortgage and Loan Repayment Assistant: Used to set up a variable payment loan scheduled transaction.

Easy Account Reconciliation: Integrated reconciliation makes reconciling your GnuCash accounts with statements simple and effective.

Multi-platform Compatibility: GnuCash is supported on a variety of platforms and operating systems. The list of fully supported operating systems (and platforms) for GnuCash 2.4.3 is: GNU/Linux (x86, Sparc, PPC), FreeBSD (x86), OpenBSD (x86), Solaris (Sparc), and MacOS X (PPC). Previous versions of GnuCash have been known to work with, SGI IRIX (MIPS), IBM AIX 4.1.5 (RS/6000), Unixware 7 (Intel), and SCO OpenServer 5.0.4 (Intel), but their current status is unknown.

Stock/Mutual Fund Portfolios: Track stocks individually (one per account) or in a portfolio of accounts (a group of accounts that can be displayed together).

On-line Stock and Mutual Fund Quotes: With GnuCash, you no longer need look up your stock values one at a time. The process can be automated, to always present you with the latest value of your stocks.

Native Languages: GnuCash has been fully translated into 12 languages: Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish and Swedish. More than 13 other languages are partially supported.

Multiple Currencies and Currency Trading: Multiple currencies are supported and can be bought and sold (traded). Currency movements between accounts are fully balanced when double-entry is enabled.

International Date Handling: GnuCash understands that different countries display the date differently. You are able to work with the date format you are accustomed to.

On-line exchange rates: With GnuCash, you no longer need look up your exchange rates one at a time. The process can be automated, to always present you with the account values converted to your preferred currency using the latest exchange rates.

Accounts Receivable/Payable: GnuCash has an integrated Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable system. You can track Customers, Vendors, Invoicing and Bill Payment, and use different Tax and Billing Terms in a small business.

Depreciation: GnuCash can track depreciation of capital assets.

Reports: GnuCash offers a wide variety of ready-to-use business reports.

Double Entry: Every transaction must debit one account and credit others by an equal amount. This ensures the “books balance” - that the difference between income and expense exactly equals the sum of all bank, cash, stock and other assets.

Split Transactions: A single transaction can be split into several pieces to record taxes, fees, and other compound entries.

Chart of Accounts: A master account can have a hierarchy of detail accounts underneath it. This allows similar account types such as Cash, Bank, or Stock to be grouped into a master account such as “Assets”.

General Ledger: One register window can display multiple accounts at the same time. This eases the trouble of tracking down typing/entry errors. It also provides a convenient way of viewing a portfolio of many stocks, by showing all transactions in that portfolio.

Income/Expense Account Types (Categories): These categorize your cash flow and, when used properly with the double-entry feature, will provide an accurate Profit&Loss statement.

GnuCash is available on Windows.

The GnuCash file format is incompatible with versions earlier than 2.1.2. Specifically, scheduled transactions are stored differently. Using version 2.4, you can upgrade your older GnuCash file to the new format.

More translations.

Improved report handling.

Fixed lots of crashes.

Improved multi-currency support.

Enhanced QIF import.

Gnome 2.0 (Gtk2)

GnuCash is now using the latest tool-kits from gtk, and follows the normal Gnome2 HIG standards.

UTF-8 support

GnuCash now stores and reads each country’s special character sets by using UTF-8.

Budget

GnuCash now comes with a budget feature that can help you keep your expenses under control.

Import of MT940 files

Data files with transactions in MT940 format (as can be downloaded from some banks) can now be imported into GnuCash.

Bug fixes

GnuCash is now more stable and secure than ever before due to the long testing phase before we reached 2.0, as well as using more stable and mature libraries (gtk2 for instance). Numerous corrections has been made in every part of GnuCash, and too many for us to highlight any special area.