[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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