Keep Track of Your Money

Machtelt takes a look at four open-source accounting programs: Emma, GnuCash, jGnash and QHacc.
Conclusion

For personal use I will stick to GnuCash, with the account subdivisions like in Emma. GnuCash is best integrated with my other applications because I'm running a GNOME desktop environment. If I was running some other desktop platform, I'd probably opt for QHacc (out of laziness because I'd only have to install Qt). jGnash has a possible future because of its platform independence, but it doesn't meet my requirements (yet) for a personal/small-business/home-office bookkeeping package.

Resources

Emma: rainbow.mimuw.edu.pl/~la181249/emma/home.php3#downloading

GnuCash: www.gnucash.org

jGnash: sourceforge.net/projects/jgnash

QHacc: qhacc.sourceforge.net

Machtelt Garrels started out as an industrial engineer but soon became involved in internet business. With a couple of friends, she started an internet provider running Linux in 1995 and added a Cyberkafee, also running Linux, in 1996.

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Re: Keep Track of Your Money

Anonymous's picture

May I also note good old CBB (Check Book Balancer) which doesn't require either GNOME or KDE - it's a simple Tcl/Tk interface. All the basics but few frills. Not being an accountant and just needing to keep my checkbook straight that's enough :-)

It does import QIF if you need it.
Sometimes KISS is best!

Re: Keep Track of Your Money

Anonymous's picture

Thanks for a nice review. I haven't tried any of these programs, yet, but am interested. Have you condired the KDE-oriented KMyMoney2, which is also open source. The home page is at:

http://kmymoney2.sourceforge.net/

Re: Keep Track of Your Money

davidsales's picture

For a more authoritative list of Linux financial resources I recommend

http://www.linuxlinks.com/Software/Financial/

http://www.linuxlinks.com/Java/Financial/

David

Re: Keep Track of Your Money

Anonymous's picture

Try theKompany's Kapital (http://www.thekompany.com) - I'm using it for quite a while now and it looks very good, pretty stable, fast, and oh - it's now available to Sharp Zaurus..

And yes, it's a commercial one - but it costs about $30.. worth every cent..

Re: Keep Track of Your Money

Anonymous's picture

From the article -

"Now I wasn't going to test this many applications, so I selected from those using my standard criteria for applications: that it run on my Linux box, be rather straightforward to install (because I'm no guru), be open source (dependencies also) and be under active development." (my emphasis)

Re: Keep Track of Your Money

Anonymous's picture

I take it you've never heard of Moneydance? I've used it under OS/2, Windows, and now Linux.

It's a nice Java program, now available from Appgen.

-bob-

Re: Keep Track of Your Money

Anonymous's picture

MoneyDance was a great program in its day, but no further development has been done on it. I believe the author left Appgen two or three years back.

MoneyDance is in fact Orphanware. I registered my copy long agao and was very satisfied with it. However, when Sean left, development stopped.

At one point we petition Appgen to give the rights back to Sean, with zero results. Appgen now sells a dead program which is not updated or maintained.

I assume people know by now,

Anonymous's picture

I assume people know by now, but MoneyDance is back up and in the original developer's hands. check it out: www.moneydance.com

Re: Keep Track of Your Money

Anonymous's picture

I take it you've not realised the article was about Open Source apps. Also, for those not on the moneydance mailing list, its pretty much now a dead horse, still sold, but they no longer have any developers, and support is fairly non-existant.

Quite alot of members on the moneydance list are talking about developing their own open source package, and also the jGnash develop has just spoken up on the list...

Moneydance is not open source

Anonymous's picture

I take it you've never heard of Moneydance?

The author only considered open-source packages.

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