[RndTbl] Personal Linux Fnance App
Glen Ditchfield
gjditchfield at acm.org
Mon May 20 10:03:00 CDT 2002
On May 18, 2002 07:42 pm, Mel Seder wrote:
> I've been using Quicken since the late 80's or early 90's. It does
> everything I need to do including getting prices for Canadian mutual
> funds.
I've used GnuCash (http://www.gnucash.org) for household finances for a few
years. I'm using the most recent stable version, 1.6.6, compiled for Red Hat
7.2 from the source RPM.
It's based on double-entry bookkeeping principles, so terminology and
operation may be more strict than you are used to from Quicken. You set up
accounts, and every transaction moves money from source accounts to
destination accounts: "salary" to "bank", "bank" to "MUUG fees"... As a
chequebook balancer, it's overkill.
You can set up accounts for stocks and mutual funds. GnuCash can retrieve
prices for stocks, through an interface to Perl's Finance::Quote module, but
the interface is inflexible. I tried to retrieve Canadian mutual fund
prices, and failed.
Currency conversion is awkward in the stable version: every conversion has
to move through a currency conversion account. I've avoided it so far.
The only import format supported is QIF, which is hit-or-miss because of
the incredible inventiveness that financial institutions have shown when
generating screwed-up QIF. The first import will probably set things up so
that the second import will go smoothly.
The unstable 1.7.x series features support for storing data in Postgres
databases, in addition to the current XML format.
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