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?

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Re:Not applicable to /.

[brondsem]

Doesn't this question assume that we have money? Considering the huge numbers of high school and college students on slashdot, that seems like an unfounded assumption.

The amount of money is irrelevant. I'm a college student and I have a part-time job, tuition payments, an investment fund, a bank account, car insurance payments and taxes to keep track of.

Re:Not applicable to /.

[bwatt]

Er, I might point out that it is when you don't have buckets of cash, that you should be most concerned with tracking how much you have and what you spend it on...

[Gak! That sounds highly responsible, no?]

Why I don't like Quicken

[vegetablespork]

Even if Intuit released a version of Quicken for Linux today, I wouldn't use it.

Strike 1: Intuit charges me for the software--then has the audacity to attempt to force me to give up personal information to use it (astalavista.box.sk to the rescue again).

Strike 2: Intuit spams me with sales pitches based on information entered into the program. I already paid once, thank you.

Strike 3: Using the online services requires me to go through Intuit as an intermediary, rather than keeping the relationship only between me and my financial institution. Given their proven propensity to bother me with ads, I don't exactly trust them with my financial details.

Yer out!

My advice - avoid these programs in general

[Ars-Fartsica]

On a somewhat related note, I have found that most people who purchase these programs want to decrease expenditures, feeling that if they organize their expenses, they will reduce them.

In general I have found this not to be the case. If you simply want a category breakdown, your credit card should already provide it - mine does. Otherwise, a simple check of your accounts once a week should give you a simple idea of how your spending is going.

Simply put, the only way to reduce expenditures is to not buy things. Also, watch for monthly fees you start incurring for this service or that - these monthly fees constitute a huge drain on most people's cash, and our economy is moving more and more to a rental model where it will be hugely important to control recurring service fees.

Added to which, most banks charge for the pleasure of automagically syncing Quicken with your account (although you can still manually update Quicken with a download file for free with most banks). So you could be losing money while trying to save it.

Pro's & Con's of Grumbling

[bihoy]

On the one hand I too feel that sometimes folks do not always do their homework. On the other hand I actually learned something from some of the replies to this post.

This is an area that I am interested in, but not so much that I would have spent my own time researching them. I too would like a open source offering that is like quicken and that runs on Linux.

It would be nice if there was a topic here on slashdot for folks to share information on specific topics that they have researched. Not with the intent or pretext of asking a question but with the intent of generating further discussion on the topic. Or perhaps all that is needed is a new name or subtitle for "Ask Slashdot".

Hopefully this would allow everyone involved to expand their horizons in a collaborative fashion.

Re:Not applicable to /.

[peddrenth]

Use just a text file like everyone else. That also makes it easier to encrypt if you don't have PGPDisk (it's all in the one file).

Use Gnumeric to do your calculations (and always have a worksheet open when you're on the phone to your bank to write notes in) but it's a lot easier to find things if you put the results back into the text file when you're finished.

The alternative (one spreadsheet for each thing) looks pretty for a while, until the next time you change software and find that copies of OpenOffice or Excel at university or on your windows partition can't read them.

This sort of data is what the "platform independance" argument is all about (c.f. Peru). It's stuff you'll still need to access long after your current software, computer, and operating system no longer exist. Need I even say that proprietry accounting software is out of the question.

Re:I want

[yota]

I want the ability to link up to my bank, credit card companies, morgage companies, retirement fund, etc. and download the latest data like I can with Quicken.

Has anybody tried to run Quicken with WINE? How does it work?

Adding Quicken support to CrossOver Office could make it more interessant since there's no equivalent in Linux. Anybody from CodeWeavers here?

Andrea

Re:I want

[mike_the_kid]

In MS Money 2002, under Tools / Options, there is a checkbox in the "Display" set of options on the default options page called "Turn off sponsorship and shopping links." If you do go onto some of the MSN services, such as the home finder, you will see some ads, but if you wait 5 seconds, they go away. Checking "Turn off sponsorship and shopping links" removes all ads and special offers from the core program, as far as I can tell.

My experiences with trying GnuCash

[Laplace]

At one point I tried to install and use GNUCash as my personal finance manager. The first problem that I ran in to was dependency hell. The program relies on tens of libraries. I went through quite a few ./configure --> download dependency --> install dependency --> ./configure until I was able to finally produce a build.

Now, GNUCash works on a double entry accounting system. That means every time you take money away from one account it goes into another, and vice versa. In some sense, it depends upon the idea that money just can appear out of nowhere, and it just can't disappear into the void. Supposedly it is a very powerful system of accounting. However, the problem that I ran in to was setting my accounts up. I have several different debts (student loans), and several different investments (401K, personal investments), as well as the balances in my checking and savings accounts. I just couldn't figure out how to reasonably set up my initial finances, let alone creating special accounts for things like payroll and taxes. I have a degree in Mathematics, but GNUCash tries to be a serious accounting program. Quicken and the like are different, and single entry accounting is much easier for a beginner to use. Apparently it is much easier to lie, cheat, and make mistakes with single accounting systems.

I finally settled on just keeping a sort of ledger. Pen and paper. I track spending in my budget with it, my current checking account levels, and I update the value of my savings and investments from time to time. It serves me well and keeps my finances on track, which is all I really need. It is also very portable, which makes it easier to account for things like grocery bills and ATM withdrawls.

What GNUCash really needs is a _good_ step by step tutorial on how to set the software up, and I'm not refering to the ./configure dependency hell.

Re:I hate it when I forget to close an html tag

[RJM]

Most of us stopped calling spelling "english" when we were in grade 5. Why do people still call arithmetic "math" ??

Because I took Advanced Mathematics 1 and 2 in high school? Because I took MATH 166, MATH 167, MATH 266, MATH 267, MATH 312, and MATH 314 in college?

Expertise

[m_evanchik]

The real expertise in a program like quicken is not on the programming end. Balancing books is a pretty trivial algorithm.

Where the real value of Quicken lies in the financial and legal expertise that it describes. For this they need the expertise of accountants and lawyers and economists etc..

If you want to develop a good open-source personal finance program, you need to find some good accountants (and tax lawyers, and financial advisers, etc) to help out in distilling their expertise, working with the programmers.

And because laws and finance are such ever-changing areas, especially at the margins, constant updating is necessary.

One big hurdle with open-source financial programs (please keep responding flames articulate) is a lack of accountability as well. When I buy turbotax, I know there is a company behind it that must take some responsibility with the program. Just for that reason, a good lawyer or accountant may be hesitant to contribute on open-source. If the software fucks up, he may be professionally liable.

I do wish at least a polished proprietary financial and tax software were available on Linux. My guess is that Linux just doesn't have the market penetration yet to justify the port.

Because of the need for updates, I even think that proprietary software might have some viability on a limited, non-transfereable, open source basis.

I haven't tried gnucash, but if intuit came out with quicken and turbotax for Linux, I would be one step closer to wiping my windows partition. Incidentally, I still wouldn't buy the linux version right away, because I still need the windows partition for other things, and my windows quicken works fine.