Advice on Linux financial software

skottish · 2006-07-15 13:17:53

What do people recommend for home budgeting financial software on Linux and why do you think it stacks up better than others? (KMyMoney2 and Gnucash 2.0 are both in the Arch Linux repositories, and others are ready to be installed in the user supported repositories.) I'm just curious on how people feel about these packages, what there experiences have been like, are they stable, and so on.

Echo · 2006-07-15 14:03:48

I recently was looking for personal financial software and spent some time with gnucash. Less time with kmymoney and jgnash. Personally my goal was to have software that would automatically handle capital gains. Quicken is what I use now and it is the only software left that makes me retain disk space for Windows. I never did find what I was looking for....

Gnucash would be overkill for budgeting in my opinion. I found it somewhat manageable, but, it's definitely slanted towards accountants and small businesses.

Jgnash was okay. I didn't spend that much time with it.

Kmymoney is what I would suggest as a starting point. It had the easiest interface to work with imo.

Moneydance is out there but not "free".

ralvy · 2006-07-15 14:37:57

I think I've tried them all, and finally settled on MoneyDance. Nothing came close to that. However, it is shareware. It costs about $30. Since it's written in Java, it can be used under Windows, Linux, Mac and OS/2. One license allows you to use it on all platforms. I was using it on Linux, Windows and OS/2 for a while there, accessing the same data file among all three platforms, leaving that file on a vfat partition. Now I confine all my work to Linux.

Before MoneyDance, I was using Quicken 8 for DOS, which works fine under dosemu. The transition from Quicken to MoneyDance was easy.

They have a very active mailing list community, which is easily accessed via news.gmane.org with your newsreader.

skottish · 2006-07-15 14:56:25

Thanks alot for your responces. I've heard others say the MoneyDance is really nice, but at the moment I don't feel like spending any money. My finances aren't real complicated anyway.

KMyMoney2 looks like it may fit the bill. The machine that it's going on is already a KDE box, so it's a small download. Gnucash wanted 45 MBs to install it and all of it's dependencies, and when installed didn't start. If I wasn't still in shock by needing half of Gnome to run it, I may have taken the time to get it working!

Thanks again. Your help was very valuable.

ralvy · 2006-07-15 15:04:49

skottish wrote:

KMyMoney2 looks like it may fit the bill.

That was my second choice. Haven't looked at it for a while now. Enjoy.

elasticdog · 2006-07-15 21:07:15

I use jGnash for all my finances and have been for over a year now. It's also Java-based, and thus cross-platform. I lost interest in GnuCash after using it for awhile on Ubuntu and then fully realizing the dependency nightmares that it has when I moved to Arch. Admittedly I haven't tried the latest versions, but it's still a mess IMO (from what I've kept up with).

jGnash does everything that I need and will eventually have budgeting built-in as well. I've tried some of the other options (not KMyMoney2, since I don't run KDE), and nothing really struck me as being any better. jGnash handles various types of accounts (including investments), has automatic payment reminders, report generation, and a very clean interface. If you're looking around, I'd definitely suggest at least trying it out...

bpisciot · 2006-07-15 22:57:33

Echo wrote:

Quicken is what I use now and it is the only software left that makes me retain disk space for Windows.

I use Quicken, but I run it over Crossover Office. This, of course, requires the added expense of purchasing Crossover Office, but has the benefit of getting Windows COMPLETELY off my PC. Quicken 2006 runs great on Crossover Office, BTW.

Bob P.

chrismortimore · 2006-07-16 11:02:07

I use an OpenOffice spreadsheet.

skottish · 2006-07-16 13:43:09

chrismortimore wrote:

I use an OpenOffice spreadsheet.

That was actually my first thought, but my thread is intentionally a little vague. I'm not the one who needs the budgeting software and she's the Anti-Nerd!!!! I'm curious: did you do it from scratch or did you work off a tutorial of some sort?

Echo · 2006-07-16 14:34:17

I use Quicken, but I run it over Crossover Office. This, of course, requires the added expense of purchasing Crossover Office, but has the benefit of getting Windows COMPLETELY off my PC.

I had no idea this was even possible. I "assumed" that you had to have windows installed to install quicken. I'm stunned. To me it would be worth the expense as long as Crossover Office is reasonably priced. Thanks for the tip.

None of the linux brand financial software fits the bill for me....yet.

chrismortimore · 2006-07-16 15:56:06

skottish wrote:

That was actually my first thought, but my thread is intentionally a little vague. I'm not the one who needs the budgeting software and she's the Anti-Nerd!!!! I'm curious: did you do it from scratch or did you work off a tutorial of some sort?

I made it up from scratch, it isn't anything fancy though. Here is a quick explanation of what it is:

I have a sheet for each account with 5 columns: "Date of Transaction", "Transaction amount", "Running total", "Transaction Type" and "Comment", so I get something like "16/07/2006, -£20, [running total here], ATM Withdrawl, Tesco cash machine"

I then have a sheet that gives me the current balance for each account, and then adds the current accounts (I have two), adds the savings accounts (I have two also), and subtracts the credit card balances, and gives me a final grand total.

The final sheet is a chart, and what I do is every Monday, I enter the current balance of each account. This way, I can see where my money is going on a weekly basis (weekly is enough for me) and I can see if I'm spending too much

Hope that is of some help, I would show you it but I don't really wanna send my bank balances around

nifan · 2006-07-16 17:47:45

There's a new home banking program called HomeBank (go figure ), you sould take it for a spin.

website: http://homebank.free.fr/index.php

skottish · 2006-07-17 02:03:19

nifan wrote:

There's a new home banking program called HomeBank

Hey, HomeBank is in community. How convenient is that?

whompus · 2006-07-17 17:59:25

I'm using Grisbi which is in the AUR

jokele · 2006-07-22 13:13:25

I use moneyplex for several years now and got it working with gentoo, kubuntu and now archlinux. Unfortunately it is only available in German.

http://www.matrica.de/produkte/produktmpx.html

Pudge · 2006-07-25 17:15:42

Echo wrote:

I use Quicken, but I run it over Crossover Office. This, of course, requires the added expense of purchasing Crossover Office, but has the benefit of getting Windows COMPLETELY off my PC.
I had no idea this was even possible. I "assumed" that you had to have windows installed to install quicken. I'm stunned. To me it would be worth the expense as long as Crossover Office is reasonably priced. Thanks for the tip.
None of the linux brand financial software fits the bill for me....yet.

I had Quicken 2002 Basic running on Arch through wine, which is available in the repositories for free. The only problem I had was printing over my lan. Printed OK on a local printer though. Exact Audio Copy, which in my opinion is the best CD ripper, also worked good through wine.

How good wine does or doesn't work depends on several factors , such as hardware, so how well it works for you may differ but it worked great for me.

Pudge

Moo-Crumpus · 2006-07-26 11:00:26

I use moneyplex as native linux app. Never made gnucash to use my hbci card. moneyplex still does what it has to do: make me able to pay my bills - if I have enough money.

Echo · 2006-07-26 13:33:36

Okay, Crossover Office is out for me, I'm too cheap to spend the money. It sounded good until it came time for me to pay for it. :shock:

I was going to try jgnash one more time. I tried to import my QIF files into jgnash. The import QIF files part of jgnash was running at least two hours and nothing. I killed java.

Well, once I get motivated I'll try wine and Quicken. I've never used wine before....but I'll look into it.

Arch Linux

#1 2006-07-15 13:17:53

Advice on Linux financial software

#2 2006-07-15 14:03:48

Re: Advice on Linux financial software

#3 2006-07-15 14:37:57

Re: Advice on Linux financial software

#4 2006-07-15 14:56:25

Re: Advice on Linux financial software

#5 2006-07-15 15:04:49

Re: Advice on Linux financial software

#6 2006-07-15 21:07:15

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#7 2006-07-15 22:57:33

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#8 2006-07-16 11:02:07

Re: Advice on Linux financial software

#9 2006-07-16 13:43:09

Re: Advice on Linux financial software

#10 2006-07-16 14:34:17

Re: Advice on Linux financial software

#11 2006-07-16 15:56:06

Re: Advice on Linux financial software

#12 2006-07-16 17:47:45

Re: Advice on Linux financial software

#13 2006-07-17 02:03:19

Re: Advice on Linux financial software

#14 2006-07-17 17:59:25

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#15 2006-07-22 13:13:25

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#16 2006-07-25 17:15:42

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#17 2006-07-26 11:00:26

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