Thank you to John J. for suggesting this application. Be sure to subscribe to the site feed to keep up with the bombast of new applications.
GnuCash is a personal finance and accounting application created to keep you crazy organized. It can do simple things like recording expenses and take care of register transactions, but it can also handle tracking bank accounts, income, and a slew of financial instruments and derivatives.
John J. summed it up quite well in his suggestion e-mail:
...GnuCash is a great piece of financial software. I just use it to keep my home financials in order, but it has so many other functions that I would never even need to use.
It uses professional standards like double-entry accounting, which my professors babble on and on about being important. They generally mention words like 'Enron' and 'lawsuit' in context. The register has an easy interface that can handle checking and credit transactions, as well as currency and stock asset trades. Different currencies are taken care of easily.
The last thing I ever want to do is enter information by hand, so it's great that GnuCash can take care of that for me, as OSAlt reports:
With support for OFX DirectConnect and HBCI - GnuCash can even communicate with you bank, etc. if they support these standards ...
A variety of different graphs and reports are included in the program via the integrated reporting and graphing module, such as Profit & Loss and Portfolio Valuation reports. GnuCash will play nice with other financial applications, allowing the proprietary data formats to be imported in. You can also schedule recurring payments, search for transactions, and print checks.
Installation can be done graphically by opening the Add/Remove... dialog and checking the box next to GnuCash (as described here), or by typing the following code into the Terminal:
sudo apt-get install gnucashI'm a bit of a finance-junkie, and I'm interested in hearing what you think of GnuCash. How does it compare against the proprietary competition?
8 comments:
Did you try KMyMoney already? I somehow find it more familiar an easier to use than GnuCash.
Me, I like my financial software simple. Double entry bookkeeping has never been my thing. So I use HomeBank to do my personal finances.
I love GnuCash. I've been using it for about 3 years now. I've tried a few other applications including kmymoney, but I also prefer the work flow in GnuCash more.
I have been using Moneydance for about 3 years now with very good results. Excellent cross platform compatibility and a simple, easy to use interface. It is nice to see that we have some good personal finance program options under Linux these days.
I'm honestly surprised that there are so many options out there. I reviewed GnuCash because I thought it was the only viable Linux finance application that existed. I'm thinking I should do a post where I compare KMyMoney, HomeBank, and Moneydance in a few weeks.
I agree with David that the workflow in GnuCash is quite intuitive, but I wonder how it is with the other applications.
I use HomeBank and Money Manager Ex...
Just for the record :)
I'm eager to leave MSMoney, because it's COTS that has adware, and on top of that all my financial data is tied up in a closed format. GNUCash has been around a long time, and I'm hoping to make the change, if I can get over all the data re-entry. I'll certainly lose information in the migration. I'm hoping GNUcash can be synch'd with an app for the N800 (debian-based PDA).
I used Moneydance. I use it to keep track of three separate accounts at my bank. It is definitely worth the $30 one-time license fee.
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