Money Management in Linux

Before installing CBB, you should make sure you have Perl version 4.036 or later, and Tk version 4.0 or later installed on your system.

Installing CBB is very straightforward:

You will be prompted for 4 items:

CBB attempts to present you with reasonable defaults for all of these items.

When you have finished answering these four questions, CBB will be installed.

So, you want to go for a little test drive? Want to see how, or if, this thing works? Want to send me a 21 inch monitor or the DOS drivers for my ancient Sony PAS16-SCSI CD-ROM drive? Well, read on...

The following procedure will lead you through the process of creating a new account, importing some data, editing transactions, and balancing your account.

First, here is the “one-paragraph” version of the tutorial. To use CBB, first create the directory where you would like to keep your accounts. Then, change to this directory, run CBB, and create the accounts. You may import the default account categories at any time. Finally, load the desired account (if it is not already loaded) and create, delete, and edit transactions to your heart's content, while printing reports, viewing graphs, and so on. When your bank statement arrives in the mail, balance the account.

For a more detailed tutorial, read on...

After installing CBB, the first thing you need to do is create an account.

Once you have created an account, it is time to enter a few transactions. You can import some sample data to save your fingers from the brutalities of typing. The CBB distribution comes with some sample data for this tutorial. Otherwise, feel free to skip this section and enter your own transactions.

Now that you have some data to play with (Figure 3), try editing a transaction. Then try creating new transactions. Try playing around with “splits” to specify more than one category for a transaction. Play around with CBB until you get the hang of it.