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?

online banking

[gnudutch]

Would somebody please cleanly reverse engineer Quicken's online banking??? Bank of America's online banking is Quicken based, instead of the more logical choice secure html.

Check out MoneyDance

[jockm]

I use MoneyDance [moneydance.com]. It's Java based, so it runs on Linux, Win32, MacOS X, etc...

generally...

[dollargonzo]

most people and businesses are using finance applications where a simple paper record or a digital one would MORE than suffice. you have a number of records, they are stored, once every year / quarter or whenever u do your finances you tally them up, and sit down for a day or so and calculate everything. the thing about finance applications is that in general, it takes more time for people to USE them then to just do it by hand. people have forgotten how to do simple maths :-(

now not only do they not know how to use a pencil and paper, they cant even use a CALCULATOR! they need special software to do EVERYTHING for them

QED

It would really help...

[xonker]

if you would have specified what it is that Gnucash won't do that Quicken does. "Isn't up to par..." doesn't really cut it. I've used Gnucash a little bit, and it seems to have everything that I would want - but my personal finances aren't so complicated that I can't manage them in my check register and savings book. I'm not really disciplined enough to enter every little thing into Gnucash often enough to make it worthwhile. My personal theory of finance is to earn way more money than I spend and always have enough in the bank to cover purchases, and not to have to rely on credit cards.

If there are specific features you're looking for, you should have mentioned them. Right now this is just another in a series of useless "Ask Slashdot" questions that indicate the poster didn't do any footwork on their own or even think very hard about the question.

I use moneyplex for quite a while now.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.matrica.de/

I don't do big things with it. :)
Just online banking, but I think it is quite nice.
But it costs a bit of money and is not open source... :-(

Re:I want

[HawkinsD]

An open-source version of Quicken or MS Money might address something that I hate about both of them: the constant advertising. It's annoying to be "warned" by MS Money: "Warning! You haven't registered to receive free money-saving offers!" "Click here to save on life insurance!"

I'd feel better if I were running a bootleg copy. But I stupidly paid retail for it.

Re:*Grumble*

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a recurring theme on Ask Slashdot - people who don't take the .01 second to do a simple google search! [google.com] begging for answers to their questions. Can we have a pulldown menu that has a stock "RTFM" response?!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

MS Money

[Ahotasu]

Personally, and I know I'll probably get flamed to hell and back, I use Microsoft Money and find it workes quite well for managing my many investments, mortgage, 401K, and my checking account. I've never used Quicken, but I bet the two are comparable in features if not in performance or asthetics. I also have never tried wine (sounds like a lot of hassle, plus I dual-boot with Win2K), and thus have never tried Money under wine.

When I first tried GnuCash, I found it was able to do the majority of the things I do in Money, though not necessarially quite as user-friendly. Two major things that I found I was unable to do in GnuCash, however, were internet updates for my various investments (Mutual Funds, 401K, etc). I also tend to use a lot of the reports and graphing features in Money. GnuCash's capabilities in this respect were limited.

One thing that Money doesn't do, though, which I find to be a pain and would like GnuCash to be able to do is updating the prices (value) of US Savings Bonds using interest rate info from the 'Net.

And, just because I'm just in a flame-fishing mood today, I have to say that I tend to be very resistant to moving to a new program in general. Moving to a new program and losing any functionality (that I use at all) is not going to happen. Moving to a new program whose asthetics are (IMHO) much less pleasing and whose functionality is less is definitely not going to happen. UNLESS, that is, the new program has some additional functionality which weighs in more heavily, of course.

Just my $0.02...

my 'must have' feature

[slide-rule]

I have actually poked at each release of GnuCash, but consistently it lacks one feature that I am rather addicted to: scheduling income and expenses, and combining this into a budget forecast for the next N months. With something like this, correctly setup, I not only know how much money I have an any account *right now*, but I will have a reasonable ball-park figure for how much money I will have in three months, six months, etc. A nifty line-plot is handy to see where, when, and how bad the next "low point" is going to be, and as necessary I can adjust funds to deal with it gracefully before it has a chance to bite my sorry a$$. Very useful planning tool that, now, I cannot do without. This is the one single feature keeping a '98 partition hanging around my house.

Now, I'm not too bad writing bits of code and what-not (it's a tangential part of my day job), and I appreciate that, to some extent, linux money applications can be scripted and stuff; maybe I could roll my own forecaster this way, but I really don't want to feel like I need to kludge together such a relatively 'big' feature when I don't have the time and interest after getting home. (Maybe it's just me, and, yes, I'm a bit lazy once I'm off the clock. ;)

I probably haven't looked into all possible alternatives for a linux-based financial program, but so far I haven't noticed one that really handles this.

Re:I want

[gosand]

I use GnuCash, and it has the ability to import QIF files (Quicken). I don't use it, so I can't comment on how well it works.

But it sounds to me like you are looking for a convenience. If the only reason you aren't using GnuCash is because you can't directly link to all those sources (401k, bank, CC), then it would seem that you are just a little lazy. Can't you just manually enter it? Yeah, I know, computers make things easier, and once you get used to them (lazy) then it is harder to do things for yourself. But I suppose that is why Windows is so popular.

up to par

[h4x0r-3l337]

While the free software versions may not quite be up to par with the current commercial offerings, it won't always be the case.

Yes it will. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but writing software like that is BORING. Take a look at the best open source software out there and you'll see that it is "interesting" software: operating systems, window managers, development tools. Financial software is the kind of boring crud that nobody writes for fun, and so something like GNU cash will progress until the easy features are done, and then the authors will realize they don't want to spend any more time on such an uninteresting piece of software, and they will move on to something more interesting. Some software is just so utterly uninteresting or unprestigious that nobody works on it for fun, you have to PAY them to work on it.

Re:*Grumble*

[pstreck]

Well i did do research before a posted the question. and i never ran across Chritopher Browne's page in my searches. I went through the typical routes, google, freshmeat, sf. And i didnt find anything that was up to par. I had been using GNUCash for about 3 months and found it seriously lacking. So stop your grumbling, and thanks for the link.

Re:One hitch

[Triskaidekaphobia]

see they're using the word 'Druid' instead of 'Wizard'

And that is why free software is failing on the desktop; if each package uses different terms for the same functionality is it any wonder that users are put off.

Bitch about Microsoft, logo-requirements and usability guidelines all you like, but if software written to those standards is usable by people without much computer knowledge then it is going to be used.

Again, there are copywrite/trademark issues

[rakeswell]

see they're using the word 'Druid' instead of 'Wizard'

And that is why free software is failing on the desktop; if each package uses different terms for the same functionality is it any wonder that users are put off.

I work for an online brokerage firm, and a new feature slated to me rolled out is a "trading wizard". That's a generic enough term, you'd guess. Guess again.

We had to figure out a different name for it as the term has been trademarked/copywritten by another firm.

I don't know if this is the case here, but in addition to product differentiation, it's a good strategy to call a feature something other than the generic term that might first come to mind -- an open source project really can't afford lawsuits.

Online banking

[br0ken by design]

Who the hell needs to track their money by hand when the bank does it for you?

Most banks have this now, and it's usually free.
Just use your debit card or direct withdrawl instead of checks (checks can take days to clear...this is bad if you want an up-to-date statement), and you should have no problems.

:wq

GnuCash Doesn't Cut It

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been reading over some of the posts to this question, and have seen responses that range from a napkin to spreadsheet software to GnuCash and MoneyDance. However, my experience has been that from the software products that I have seen in action, there is nothing like Quicken available to Linux users (I have not tried Kapital.). It may be true that the majority of /. readers only want to track their checking/savings accounts. However, there are a large number of people who want to also track Mutual Funds, Stocks, 401Ks, etc. Also, they want financial planning tools to help them achieve financial goals for long term financial stability. GnuCash does not even offer a budgeting tool at this point, although I have heard that this is in the works. What I want in a financial app is the ability to do all of the above mentioned items, sync via the Internet with banks, brokerages, and credit card companies, and personal financial analysis tools. I love Linux, but one of the reasons why I still have a Windows partition around is Quicken.