Friday 21 September 2007

software for managing finances

Dear lazyweb,

I decided to track our (mine and my finceé's) expenses more closely and I am in search of some software for this task.

The requirements for the software:
  • not to hard to use (I don't want to read a whole manual to know how to use it)
  • possibility to assign a category for a given expense (so I can locate problematic type of expenses)
  • can easily extract statistics (e.g.: top last month's expenses, expenses split per category)
  • appropriate for domestic (small scale) accounting
  • available in Debian (or will be soon :-) )
  • preferably GNOME/GTK based
I have never used such software before, so I am a total noob in this area. Please be gentile if I might have naively described the problem.

Thanks in advance!

7 comments:

SEJeff said...

Try out homebank, it is one of the best finance managers written in gtk on Linux.

Anonymous said...

Try homebank - currently on mentors.debian.net and awaiting a final fix to resolve copyright problems to get it through NEW.

Anonymous said...

I have been using GnuCash for almost 4 years now and quite like it. It's not too hard to use, IMHO.

Anonymous said...

not gtk-based at all but very useful and easy to use: kmymoney

Anonymous said...

You could try Buddi, a very simple budgeting system, available as deb
package.

silwol said...

I have been working with grisbi for a long time because it was very simple in comparison with the old gnucash version. Since gnucash passed version 2, I use it. Both are GTK based, debian and ubuntu packaged and rather easy to use. Gnucash has very meaningful statistics like the expense development on a monthly base (I can for example see my new laptop or my previous holiday very well in the diagram, but I don't want to post my personal finance situation here as you may understand :-) )

Anonymous said...

I prefered grisbi because it had less dependencies than gnucash (and I don't use gnome, so), and also because the documentation of grisbi is well written and helps getting started when you don't know how to manage personal finances.
Based on a previous commentary, it might be that grisbi has less powerful functionalities for statistics, but I didn't look into detail.