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Personal Finance Software for Unix?

Posted by Cliff on from the free-the-quickening dept.

pstreck asks: "I'm trying to find the best personal finance software for Unix. I've been using Quicken for a while, but unfortuantlly it won't run under Wine. I've tried gnucash but it just isn't up to par with what Quicken offers. What do you guys use?" While the free software versions may not quite be up to par with the current commercial offerings, it won't always be the case. The turning point can start now, of course. What finance software are you using now, what features do you like and what features do you think these software packages need?

1 of 306 comments (clear)

  1. MS Money by Trevin · · Score: 0, Troll

    I got hooked on MS Money 3 about twelve years ago, upgraded to MS Money 4 when Microsoft offered it for free download, and have used it ever since. I've never used Quicken, the main reason being that I didn't want to go through the hassle of converting all my existing finance records, and potentially lose some data.

    I tried using GnuCash last month so that I'd have one less reason to use a Windows emulator. (VMware; MS Money won't run under wine.) Transferring my existing accounts, though a two-step process (export from Money, import to GnuCash), wasn't hard. And I did like several of GnuCash's features, like the arbitrary hierarchy of categories and being able to view a payee as an expense account.

    After using both MS Money and GnuCash concurrently for about a week, I decided to stick with MS Money. The primary reason was that I discovered that GnuCash did *not* import my transaction memos! (Well, actually it looks like it did keep memos for split transactions, but not for normal transactions.)

    Another feature I rely on heavily in MS Money is the payment calendar -- reminders of what bills or statements I should be expecting in the mail. This became a critical feature for me a few years back when the post office mysteriously 'lost' some of my bills repeatedly over several months. GnuCash doesn't have anything similar.

    The charts that GnuCash offers are cute, but not useful. MS Money offers several _dozen_ report and chart types, each of which can be customized (I have 6 custom charts which I use more frequently than the built-in charts). And moreover, each report can be displayed either as text or a graph. To be specific, here are the reports/graphs that I frequently use:

    * Cash History: a sum of my liquid assets (cash, checking, and savings accounts) shown in a line graph over time. GnuCash has an Assets over Time bar chart, but it includes all other assets.

    * Liquid Net Worth: a simple summary report of my liquid assets vs. liabilities (credit cards). Again, GnuCash has a Balance Sheet, but it includes all other assets.

    * Monthly Cash Flow: a report showing my transactions by category (rows) and month (columns). I think GnuCash's Transaction Report is supposed to do something like this, but I couldn't get it to work ("No matching transactions found").

    * Spending (after taxes): a bar chart showing my expenses, excluding taxes taken out of my paycheck. Similar to GnuCash's Expenses over Time bar chart (except that GnuCash includes tax expenses).

    I also have a minor complaint about GnuCash's charts: they don't size well. MS Money fits the chart nicely to the size of the window, and you can customize sich things as whether to show a legend, what type of graph to use, B/W vs. color, etc. GnuCash appears to use a fixed chart size that I can't change.

    Also, when you right-click on certain chart elements in MS Money (such as a slice of a pie chart), you have the option to view the transactions related to that element. In GnuCash, clicking on most charts does nothing, but in some charts it will distort the image. Cute, but not useful.