[Tuxaloosa] Open-source personal finance recommendations?

Beddingfield, Allen allen at ua.edu
Thu Dec 30 05:29:13 UTC 2010


I hung on to Quicken 99 for way too long, and now I just use OpenOffice Calc spreadsheets.  Would be curious to see what solution you come up with.
That MoneyManager looks promising...
Allen B.


----- Original Message -----
From: Cameron Purvis [mailto:cameron.purvis at gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 29, 2010 08:50 AM
To: Tuscaloosa Linux Users Group <tuxaloosa at tuxaloosa.org>
Subject: [Tuxaloosa] Open-source personal finance recommendations?

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?
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