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GnuCash: expense tracking/amounts left under limits
Yes.  The simplest option to track your spending over time is to familiarize yourself with the "Reports" menu on the toolbar.  Take a look specifically at the "Reports > Income/Expense > Income Statement" report, which will sum up your income and spending over a time frame (defaults to the current year). In each report that you run, there is an "Options" button at the top of the screen.  Open that and look on the "General" tab, you'll be able to set the time frame that the report displays (if you wanted to set it for the 2 week block since your last paycheck, for example).  Other features you're going to want to familiarize yourself with are the Expense charts & statements, the "Cash Flow" report, and the "Budgeting" interface (which is relatively new), although there is a bit of a learning curve to using this last feature. Most of the good ideas when it comes to tracking your spending are independent of the software you're using, but can be augmented with a good financial tracking program.  For example, in our household we have multiple credit cards which we pay in full every month.  We selected our cards on specific benefits that they provide, such as one card which has a rotating category for cash back at certain business types.  We keep that card set on restaurants and put all of our "eating out" expenses on that card.  We have other cards for groceries, gas, etc.  This makes it easy to see how much we've spent in a given category, and correlates well with the account structure in gnucash.