[Tuxaloosa] Open-source personal finance recommendations?

[Todd Morgan]

I'm not the expert when it comes to home finance organization.......however,
I seem to recall being pretty impressed with HomeBank. I'm not sure this
fits your needs or not. It is worth a look.

http://homebank.free.fr


On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 8:50 AM, Cameron Purvis <cameron.purvis at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hope everyone had a good holiday experience - sufficient quality and
> quantity food... :)
>
> So the calendar end of year is upon me.  I have used Quicken for
> personal finances for a very, very long time and have upgraded every
> couple of years.  Still, it's like the MS-Office case - it does all
> kinds of wonderful things, of which maybe 20% are things I use.  I'd
> like to 'reboot' my financial management.  I've tried a few things in
> the past but would love to hear from anyone out there who's doing
> personal finance work - what tools do you use?
>
> * Quicken - obviously the market leader.  It has the benefit of being
> the most widely-supported app in terms of bank integration for
> downloading transactions, et c.  Despite this, Intuit seems to be in a
> constant bug-fixing war.  Version 2009 is much better but they
> basically trashed the UI, at least to my notice after moving from 2004
> (or 2005).  It has lots of features that are nice but could probably
> be implemented outside the app like bill reminders, memorized
> transactions, et c.
>
> * GNUcash is the knee-jerk answer for OSS personal accounting.  It
> uses a different mental model from Quicken, and I may be too stupid to
> use it.  GNUcash looks like an awesome accounting app but may be
> overkill.  Still, maybe it's time to cowboy up and learn it?
>
> * Spreadsheets - several friends of mine just use spreadsheets to do
> this.  It is tempting to even do a google doc so that I have access
> everywhere but that gets close to the maybe-privacy-concern of...
>
> * mint.com which is surprisingly nice but really doesn't handle cash
> transactions very well at all - which is a problem for dinosaurs who
> still use cash a lot.  Plus you are giving all your financial logins
> to a third party.  Still if you're okay with that, it's a very very
> smooth service.  Gaping hole in their functionality is that there is
> no concept of reconciling an account, so you can't 'close the books'
> on a monthly statement, quarter, et c.  Also really works best if you
> knuckle under and use THEIR categories.  Android and iPhone app is a
> bonus.
>
> * Moneydance - non OSS but I tried this ages ago.  Kind of like
> Quicken's dumb cousin.
>
> * http://www.codelathe.com/mmex/ MoneyManager EX - looks like very
> similar to Quicken.  Anyone used this?
>
> Who uses any of these?  Do you have any others?  I'd love to hear what
> you prefer (or loathe).  My goal here is to have a reasonably good
> handle on financial ins and outs, the ability to use a relatively
> limited set of categories (utilities vs. groceries etc) for budgeting
> purposes, some ability to develop basic reporting (am I overspending,
> et c) and not spend too much time managing the whole thing.
> Surprisingly, Quicken for all its features turns out to NOT actually
> shave much time off the process.
>
> So - anybody got any input on this topic?
> _______________________________________________
> TUXaloosa mailing list
> TUXaloosa at tuxaloosa.org
> http://tuxaloosa.org/mailman/listinfo/tuxaloosa
>



-- 
Todd Morgan
Birmingham, AL
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://tuxaloosa.org/pipermail/tuxaloosa/attachments/20101229/fd4a5552/attachment.htm>