Personal Finance Software for Unix?

pstreck asks: "I'm trying to find the best personal finance software for Unix. I've been using Quicken for a while, but unfortuantlly it won't run under Wine. I've tried gnucash but it just isn't up to par with what Quicken offers. What do you guys use?" While the free software versions may not quite be up to par with the current commercial offerings, it won't always be the case. The turning point can start now, of course. What finance software are you using now, what features do you like and what features do you think these software packages need?

The superior linux finance application.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

sc.

Re:The superior linux finance application.

[Anonymous Coward]

sc?

Re:The superior linux finance application.

[ikitat]

sc is a older curses based spreadsheet program for unix.

Try Kapital

[motorsabbath]

Try kapital:

http://www.thekompany.com/products/kapital

My girfriend loves it, I prefer a good spreadsheet (Applix)...

JB

Re:I want

[g4dget]

The protocol is open and standardized now: OFX [ofx.net] (link down right now). It's based on XML. In theory, it should not require relations between the software vendor and the bank; the end user should be able to get all the necessary information. Reality may be different, however.

*Grumble*

[jsse]

Do you really care to do a little research, before Ask:Slashdot?!

The main page of Christopher Browne's "Finances, Linux, and Stuff" is here! [hex.net]

Click to that little "2. Linux-based Financial Software" you can find what you need.

*grumble*

freshmeat had a feature on this a while ago

[SkyIce]

http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/269/ [freshmeat.net]

Kapital

[Michael Wardle]

I asked myself the same question only a few weeks ago. I came to the conclusion that Kapital [thekompany.com] from theKompany [thekompany.com] was the best option. You'll probably need KDE and Linux or FreeBSD to run it.

Somewhat ironically, I'm using GnuCash [gnucash.org] until I can afford to buy it. :-/

Both Kapital and GnuCash claim to be able to import Quicken data files, which is a very handy feature.

Kapital is reviewed here [linuxplanet.com].

Freshmeat also has a brief review [freshmeat.net] that compares many Linux/Unix financial products.

If none of these seems sufficient, maybe Quicken runs under WINE. Has anybody tried doing so?

Re:online banking

[JDeFontes]

Open Financial Exchange [ofx.net]

Quicken

[JDeFontes]

Quicken 2002 on OS X. *wink*

But seriously...

I used to work for Intuit, and at one time there was an initiative to do an online version of Quicken. Some of that work seems to have shown up in their My Finances [quicken.com] offering:

"Track checking, savings and cash accounts here. You can download balances from your financial institution..."

Use Crossover Office

[Anonymous Coward]

Though not officially supported, Quicken 2001/02 will run on Crossover Office. At least, I'm able to run it. YMMV.

An open source alternative would be better. But this at leasts saves you the reboot...

Re:Kapital

[Dr. Cam]

Quicken is reported to run _very well_ under Wine. I cannot verify this myself, as I switched to Gnucash. It lacks a little bit of the functionality of Quicken, but it offers a good deal more.

Because my wife and I have some real estate investments, and she runs a sole proprietorship, we need to make use of a "real" financial package. Quicken's use of single-entry bookkeeping used to drive me nuts at times, because some things were very complicated to set up. Gnucash is a true double-entry system.

As for getting your bank statements, unless the bank is using the newer Quicken format, downloading is trivially easy. Quicken developed the QIF format, and this is used still by a large number of financial institutions. Gnucash will sort out the duplications for you, and allow you to classify entries it cannot identify.

I won't go back.

Re:Kapital

[Damek]

This is really the only weak link in the chain of software for Linux. Personal Finance is one of the main reasons for your average home user to own a computer. Without a good, comprehensive personal finance software package, no one who has no other interest in computers (i.e., most average home users) will care to use Linux.

Kapital seems like the best bet to me. It's Linux-native, open source, though it's not free as in beer, and it looks nice. GnuCash is ugly. These things matter.

Moneydance is also a good bet, though it's not open source. But most people don't really care about that, even if they should.

Still, they both need to beef up on the features, especially Kapital. Sometimes I wonder if Linux developers ever use competing products. The people who write Kapital need to study Quicken and see what they do right.

The best features of Quicken, for me and my acquaintances, are the budgeting and scheduling features. Quicken used to schedule payments in an archaic, counter-intuitive "calendar," but now, at least in Quicken 2002, you can have on the front screen a simple summary of your scheduled payments. It shows you what bills you have upcoming, and really helps in planning.

All I really need is a register interface for entering my transactions, just like Quicken, a budgeting system like the latest Quicken, and an easy way to schedule payments and list my upcoming payments on the startup screen. The first and last are most important; the budgeting features are secondary.

Oracle Small Business Suite Works Well

[thrice]

Oracle Small Business Suite, powered by NetLedger, works well from Linux based browsers.

They provide a complete small business package which includes accounting, sfa, cms, employee expenses, time and billing, scheduling and clandars, online file cabinets, payroll, online bill payment, web store/site, and customer care features in their product.

See them @ Oracle Small Business Suite [oraclesmallbusiness.com]

Give KMyMoney2 a try

[EconomyGuy]

I found this a couple of weeks ago in the Debian package archives. If your not running Debian, it can be downloaded from sourceforge [sourceforge.net]. Overall the program is looking to be real solid. Its still in development in a lot of ways, but from my brief experiements, it looks like it has lots of nifty features and a very good ledger system.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

One hitch

[rakeswell]

Exactly right.OFX is slated for inclusion into Gnucash.

There is one hitch, however: download method. Some financial institutions require your application (MS Money/Quicken) to download the information from your bank, while others provide a browser-based hyperlink download of the qif/ofx file for you to import into your application. As long as your app supports the file formats provided, no vendor/financial institution is needed.You can curently import qif files into Gnucash.

The setup in which you download the files with your fincance application requires your app to first connect to the vendor's "branding" server, which then redirects you to your financial institution to begin the download -- this is where vendor involvement with the financial institution gets involved.

I suppose that if someone knew the address to their FI's download servlet, their application could be written to go directly there and bypass the branding servers. However, I don't think that FI's usually publish the URI for their download servlets so getting this info could be a challenge (though tech support should be able to tell you).

I've found that this interactive download method is more error-prone and resource-intensive (for the FI) than the browser-based options.

Here's a comment on building an OFX parser found on the Gnucash project goals pags [linas.org]:

There are two ways to build an OFX parser. One way is to build a compile-time DTD parser that treats the DTD as if it were an IDL, and generates C language stubs for a parser. This approach was attempted and abandoned because it leads to fragile C code and a very large binary.

• The parser is fragile because minor DTD non-compliances are hard to parse, handle and recover from.
• The parser is huge because the DTD results in hundreds of (C++) objects being generated.

The other method would be to perform run-time DTD parsing. This is attractive particularly because it is a more commonly-used approach; there are a variety of XML tools available that provide this function.

Re:One hitch

[stevey]

The code was big ? LOL!

I've been meaning to get organized and look at putting my finances, mortgage, bills, etc online - I keep them all for years so I'd be able to see where my money goes
After reading this I decided to download GNUCash - imagine my suprize: 15Mb!

root@hell:/home/skx# apt-get install gnucash
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
bonobo defoma dialog gs gs-common gsfonts guile-common guile1.4
guile1.4-slib libbonobo2 libdate-manip-perl libdigest-md5-perl libefs1
libfinance-quote-perl libgal19 libgdk-pixbuf-gnome2 libghttp1 libgimpprint1
libgnomeprint-bin libgnomeprint-data libgnomeprint15 libgtkhtml20 libguile9
libguppi16 libgwrapguile1 libhtml-parser-perl libhtml-tableextract-perl
libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl libltdl3 libmime-base64-perl liboaf0
liburi-perl libwww-perl libzvt2 oaf slib
The following NEW packages will be installed:
bonobo defoma dialog gnucash gs gs-common gsfonts guile-common guile1.4
guile1.4-slib libbonobo2 libdate-manip-perl libdigest-md5-perl libefs1
libfinance-quote-perl libgal19 libgdk-pixbuf-gnome2 libghttp1 libgimpprint1
libgnomeprint-bin libgnomeprint-data libgnomeprint15 libgtkhtml20 libguile9
libguppi16 libgwrapguile1 libhtml-parser-perl libhtml-tableextract-perl
libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl libltdl3 libmime-base64-perl liboaf0
liburi-perl libwww-perl libzvt2 oaf slib
0 packages upgraded, 38 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
Need to get 15.7MB of archives. After unpacking 47.2MB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] n
Abort.

Quicken = Personal Finances

[alexhmit01]

Quickbooks does corporate/business accounting. If you want double-entry accounting, buy Quickbooks. You don't need the Pro version for real estate and most small businesses.

Complaining about Quicken's single-entry bookkeeping is the most retarded complaint, no offense. You're complaining that the personal finance stuff doesn't do business style accounting? That would be a valid complaint except the SAME company offers a business version cheaply (it's less than $200) that does what you want.

I use Quicken Deluxe for my personal finances where I don't want double-entry and other garbage. I use Quickbooks for my corporate accounting where I need to do invoicing, credit memos, various accounts, etc.

My personal accounting consists of a checking account, investment account, and some credit cards. My corporate accounting is more complicated and needs to be more complicated.

Alex

Re:Use Crossover Office

[karlbowden]

I can also use Quicken with the latest snapshot of WINE

Tracking does save

[nuggz]

I disagree, knowing that I spent $400 last month on junk food DOES help me save money.

Knowing where/how you spend your money is the first step on spending less.

Re:Not applicable to /.

[ostrich2]

Try QHacc [sourceforge.net]. It uses plain text files to store everything. It's not too shabby, if I do say so myself. (I'm the author, of course.)

Keep it simple - use CBB

[Anonymous Coward]

I came to Linux directly from the MS-DOS world, where Quicken 7.0 for DOS handled all my account tracking and balancing needs. I found Check Book Balancer (CBB) to be the equivalent Linux program. Simple. Straightforward. Keeps all your accounts balanced. Reads QIF and writes a simple text output that's great for grepping.

If you need features along the lines of online banking, mortgage finance calculators, etc. -- then go to the web. If you need the features of a business bookkeeping package, cbb won't fit the bill. But otherwise, do yourself a favor and keep it simple. Use CBB.

Quasar Accounting Software!

[N3P1u5U17r4]

Try this Canadian software companies product called Quasar:

http://www.linuxcanada.com/quasar.html

I've installed on my Mandrake box but haven't really used it much yet.

Money

[jadenjahner]

MS Money works via Wine also. It is not the best, but it does work. GnuCash still needs refinement. You'd think Intuit would release a Linux version of Quicken.