This makes it easy to migrate to Skrooge from other money management software and vice versa. It offers the usual features you'd look for in an application to track your expenses, income, and investments, and allows you to view your data in tables and a variety of charts.
Skrooge's source code is available in its Git repository , and it's made open source under the GPL version 3. While all five of these options are well-supported and regularly updated, my final pitch is to not even use a personal finance tool at all, but instead to use spreadsheets to manage your financial data.
Yes, there's a lot to be said for having a dedicated budgeting tool. There's less reinventing of the wheel involved, and you don't have to worry as much about messing up complex formulas.
You also have the peace of mind of knowing that there are others out there who have exactly the same setup and can help you out when you get stuck. And you also need to be careful to not store personally identifiable information like account numbers in plain text, particularly if you store or back up your data to a shared location.
But the vanilla spreadsheet isn't a terrible tool either. In terms of the ease of customization, it can't be beat. Custom charts and graphs are easy to generate, and you can track additional data alongside your accounts to get a clearer picture of your spending.
Open source tools like LibreOffice Calc or Gnumetric offer great functionality and expandability to track your finances your way. Personally, I use a mix of tools. I use a personal finance tool to store the raw data and for getting an idea of what my accounts look like at a glance. But for more complex operations, I turn to a trusty spreadsheet to drill down to exactly what I want to know, particularly when I want to pair the data with other personal information I collect.
For example, I have a device in my car that tracks trips via GPS; by pulling out gasoline purchases, I can pair this information to see my exact cost per mile for every trip. Or I can pair restaurant spending with the personal health metrics I collect to see the correlation between how often I eat out and how my weight fluctuates.
So how do you choose? Most of the five personal finance managers here as well as less-frequently updated options Economizzer and Grisbi offer similar feature sets; the devil is in the details.
Sometimes, your personal preferences will dictate a particular killer feature that only one of the options hosts. The best way to find out is to dive in and start using one, and if it's not working for you, migrate your accounts to another to see if it better meets your needs.
If you're managing business transactions or just need more powerful options, you might also look around at the variety of open source ERP solutions available, which have better tools for managing complex business asset tracking and reporting needs. Whichever tool you decide to use, why not make open source the way to get control of your financial picture? I have been using it for over 14 years and it has been very solid and flexible.
I use it for my personal finances, including tracking stocks. I also used it for my small business until I closed that recently. It works well in both arenas and I am very happy with it. It is nice to know that there are other options and I had not previously heard of HomeBank so I will look at that and see if it offers any features that I might need.
Thank you for that great article. I have been finding a software to manage my finance. All of this options are great. I will try first HomeBank, it seems to be a excellent tool. Congratulations for such a great web page. It is also part of the KDE Community.
I have been using GnuCash since for tracking my personal spending. It is doing great form. I love it. How can you miss Skrooge? I find it the best of all options here. I used to use KMyMoney, bit switched to Skrroge about a year ago. It has a modern looking interface and is simple to use and yet has enough powerful features.
I've been using GnuCash to track our family business for four years now. There are a lot of great things about it for a small business; for me one of the best was its "working out of the box" configuration.
For someone like me, with only a vague idea of how to do book-keeping, that's a real plus; and it makes me look marginally competent when it's time to report to the real accountants at the end of the year. And, because the tool has been around for a long time, there are also a lot of questions and answers good ones, too "out there". I notice you don't mention its ability to save to a database like PostgreSQL.
Any comments on that? I haven't used the Postgres export feature before, because CSV snapshots are usually "good enough" for the level of additional data analysis I do. I have to admit, personally, I have an embarrassing amount of data analysis taking place in interdependent spreadsheets. I say it's partially because I appreciate being able to see the code and data in the same place, but more realistically, it's because most of the things I want to look at are pretty ad hoc at first, and then I realize I kind of want to keep the view.
Well, if you ask me, the simplest way to reduce stress in your financial life is to build a sound plan with accurate projections. To this end, technology is immensely helpful. Whether you use a spreadsheet or a tool like ontrajectory. Once you do that, then implementing your disciplined retirement strategy becomes critical. Help required please! Thanks to your article I gave up a proprietary solution for my business and have switched to Gnucash. I'm impressed.
Thanks for a great article and for helping me to make the switch. I had looked at GnuCash when David Both wrote about it but at that time, I decided not to make a decision. Recently I was looking at a couple of cloud solutions and proprietary for Mac. Just yesterday I decided to actually read some documentation not a strong suit of mine and follow some YouTube tutorials and discovered in the process that GnuCash will work very well for my business invoicing and accounting.
I'm excited by the potential and very impressed with the overall quality of the software and features. I installed it on my Linux laptop too which is the direction I really want to go. I'm moving further away from proprietary solutions too which tend to limit. I still prefer a web version, for example: www. I've used Gnucash for a number of years. I like the one line register entry. Budgeting itself is done with a one page spreadsheet which breaks income down to required split per pay cycle.
This split is set up in gnucash so one transaction recording accumulates the sub accounts. I tried most of the others mentioned here but they were lacking in some way for the way I work.
I don't download from the bank just print off the transactions and enter them manually. Its not onerous only takes about 10 mins at the end of the month. When I ran a small business and used it for that I did as the vol was too much.
At the least I've managed to get her to open several savings accounts and split her pay then only spend out of each. Lately our local bank has been having a discussion on FB about the future of banking and what do people want it be like. Mostly they want the bank to be more interactive, quicker with transactions including interbank, more recording with expenses.
More mobile tech for transacting on the go. To the admins: is there a way to add a feature that allows us to pin a post that we really liked and get back to it later?
Nothing speaks linux like text files and command line As a long term Linux user for all my personal devices, and a former Quicken user in my Windows life, I really wanted a finance app to replace Quicken.
I did give GnuCash a real try but its big drawback for me was its inability to connect directly with my bank s and import transactions directly. In frustration I tried some online financial apps and settled on Mint. Yes, it's ironic, Mint is by Intuit Quicken , but it is free and does everything I need and runs on any device with a browser. The budgeting feature is strong as is customization for categorizing your spending. The weak point is reporting. I don't need printed reports so that's not a factor for me.
Security is always a concern, whether online or on your device, you'll have to make the right choice for you. I would have had to make 25, mouse movements and 50, mouse clicks to import my Quicken QIF file. I gave up after Are there only US citizens here?
Is there no one that actually tried to import a European formatted data file csv or xml into the crappy gnucash application? Our readers, authors, and moderators here are from many countries and locations around the world.
But you might get a better response from the GNUCash mailing lists. I subscribe to them and they provide a wealth of information. GnuCash has apparently been broken for some time and errors out after trying to import a QIF file, with no real reason why. It just "Error importing QIF file. I've found a list of other saying the same thing on multiple sites.
I would not recommend it until that is fixed up! Thanks for the suggestions. I am an opensource enthusiast. But I find a big problem with Open Source Sw. They are usually aesthetically unpleasing.
How can we do that better? Hey guys! What a great post! I'm currently building a small and simple tool for visualizing certain investment scenarios in advance.
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