[Tuxaloosa] Open-source personal finance recommendations?

Mon Jan 10 15:47:11 UTC 2011

Interesting timing - I just got through an hour of testing with HomeBank and
GNUCash (again).

So mint.com's ongling problem in the testing has been cash transactions.  If
you absolutely don't use cash, it would be awesome, but cash completely
breaks their model of how the accounting works.  Trivia - the way total cash
appears to be handled is wacky.  Instead of saying "you have 87 dollars" the
cash totals are shown as total spending vs. total income.  That means in the
cash-only view you see "$100 income and $13 expense".  It would have been
trivial to put the obvious "$87 current balance", but for whatever reason
they didn't put that in.

So HomeBank runs much more reliably in Linux.  It handles quite differently
than Quicken, but that's more a matter of making the switch than a
particular deficiency in the program.  It *seems* to be a solid app.
GNUCash, after another chance, just doesn't speak my language.  It feels a
lot more like QuickBOOKS than QuickEN.

Will try this next.  A wrinkle that has developed is figuring out how many
of the apps I need for working from home.  Unfortunately, full Office
compatibility and the need to run some various Windows apps may force either
native Linux on a computer, or VirtualBox on the Linux system. Which would
be a great excuse for having a Quicken-capable environment around :/

On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 9:31 AM, Erik Hanson <leprkhn at gmail.com> wrote:

> I know you already made a choice, but I thought I'd add another anyway.
> http://www.youneedabudget.com/
> <http://www.youneedabudget.com/>Cross platform (win/mac/linux)
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 8:34 AM, Cameron Purvis <cameron.purvis at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> So Homebank has been subject to random crashes under Windows 7 64-bit.  I
>> hope to have a Newegg order in sometime this week for parts to again have a
>> working Linux box so here's to the hope that it's more stable under Linux.
>>
>> It seems remarkably close to Quicken and looks nice and clean.  The
>> fallback will probably be mint, but it's not clear what alternate universe
>> their categories came from.
>>
>> Thanks for the recommendations - more to come re. Homebank
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 6:04 PM, Erik Hanson <leprkhn at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Thanks to StumbleUpon, I have three more options to add:
>>>
>>> jGnash:
>>> http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/jgnash/index.php?title=Main_Page
>>> grisby: http://www.grisbi.org/
>>> GFP: http://gfd.sourceforge.net/
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 12:45 AM, Cameron Purvis <
>>> cameron.purvis at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> That's always been a little 'iffy' for my taste.   I played with it a
>>>> while back and seemed to get odd random crashes.  It's likely Untuit is
>>>> using some unsupported calls that aren't properly emulated.  It's a little
>>>> scary that this might dead-end into a reproducible crash case, that blocks
>>>> actual use.
>>>>
>>>> It either works or doesn't, eh?  ;)
>>>>
>>>> HomeBank is looking promising, though...
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 10:07 PM, Beddingfield, Allen <allen at ua.edu>wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Have you tried to get Quicken running on Codeweavers? They have it
>>>>> listed as "Silver" for Quicken 2010.
>>>>> Allen B.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>  *From*: Cameron Purvis [mailto:cameron.purvis at gmail.com]
>>>>> *Sent*: Saturday, January 01, 2011 09:44 AM
>>>>>
>>>>> *To*: Tuscaloosa Linux Users Group <tuxaloosa at tuxaloosa.org>
>>>>> *Subject*: Re: [Tuxaloosa] Open-source personal finance
>>>>> recommendations?
>>>>>
>>>>> Awesome suggestions, folks.  And anything that can be bundled with my
>>>>> install, or trivially installed (I'm looking at you, Ubuntu app store) is
>>>>> ideal.  Meta-work is a no-no.  :)
>>>>>
>>>>> My tactic is going to be running Quicken and HomeBank concurrently for
>>>>> about a month, and will probably give Mint a chance.  We'll see which of
>>>>> these options is less hassle and how skeevy mint feels with my logins ...
>>>>>
>>>>> On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 11:05 AM, Rick Williams <revrick56 at yahoo.com>wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> I don't personally use financial software, but I also use Lighthouse
>>>>>> Puppy OS. It includes HomeBank financial. Here is a link to that site:
>>>>>> http://homebank.free.fr/
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I'm not promoting it, just passing it on for info.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Rick
>>>>>>
>>>>>> --- On *Wed, 12/29/10, Beddingfield, Allen <allen at ua.edu>* wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> From: Beddingfield, Allen <allen at ua.edu>
>>>>>> Subject: Re: [Tuxaloosa] Open-source personal finance recommendations?
>>>>>> To: "'tuxaloosa at tuxaloosa.org'" <tuxaloosa at tuxaloosa.org>
>>>>>> Date: Wednesday, December 29, 2010, 11:29 PM
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 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<http://mc/compose?to=cameron.purvis@gmail.com>
>>>>>> ]
>>>>>> Sent: Wednesday, December 29, 2010 08:50 AM
>>>>>> To: Tuscaloosa Linux Users Group <tuxaloosa at tuxaloosa.org<http://mc/compose?to=tuxaloosa@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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>>>>>>
>>>>>>
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>>>>>>
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