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Managing Money With Linux Apps
lisah writes, "As part of a series of special reports this week, Linux.com is reviewing several ways to manage your money using Linux apps. First up is a review of GnuCash 2.0, a personal and small business accounting package. Though it has a bit of a learning curve, the reviewer says the application is 'stable and robust' and an upgrade from previous versions is well worth it for the program's new features and improved online banking support." Linux.com and Slashdot are both part of OSTG.
It has been working out great from the start for me and I find it far more easier to use than commercial software packages like Quicken, Microsoft Money, and QuickBooks. No annoying or lame navigation, straight to the point which what I like about it best, not to mention the free part which helps too.
:)
I have been using GnuCash 2.0 since it came out quite a few months ago and enjoying it since for all my personal finance book keeping needs.
This space is not for rent.
A way to manage all the money i saved by using open source software
I have used gnucash for over a year now, and as soon as I upgraded to 2.0 I set up automatic banking. It works great, I can download transactions and check balances for my credit cards (discover, citi bank, capital one), and my bank (charles schwab bank). I force gnucash to ask me for a password, but otherwise it is a button click.
x _rt?servicename=ofx_rt&pagename=ofx%22
The only issue is none of the banks really advertise the URL you need to use and type into gnucash. For example, discover card uses https://ofx.discovercard.com/, but good luck finding that on their site anywhere.
And citi bank you need to use
https://secureofx2.bankhost.com/citi/cgi-forte/of
I found those by searching on google.
But in any case, gnucash is a great program, in most cases better than the commercial alternatives.
I had kept a win98 virtual environment amount for years all due to one program -- Quicken. I grew to hate Intuit with a passion and finally left them for moneydance. It's a great program without any of the annoying issues that have plagued Intuit products lately. It runs on Mac, Win, and Linux. It handles multiple currencies (one of my main requirements), supposedly does online banking and cheque printing (we don't do either of those where I live), does the usual stocks, etc. Nice clean interface. One of the main things I like (that Quicken used to do back in the DOS days when it was an okay program) is show you a nice overview on your main page -- balance on every account, plus NET WORTH. That's the best motivation in the world to have fiscal good health -- having your net worth hit you every single time you open the program. It's all customizable of course.
Give it a whirl, it's worth the modest price. Platform independance for the win.
This must me an American thing, because the Dutch banks have never supported automatic downloading into 3rd party apps (as far as i know). Most banks support exporting of account data in Quicken or CSV format, but that's not always very useful, and it's still a manual process. I usually just type data in manually, which is also a good way to force me to check the input.
When using MS Money it always annoyed me (just a little) to see that feature and not be able to use it, but I understand the security aspect of that decision. Allowing an app to pull data of this level of sensitivity with just a password from a bank's website is just not secure enough. In my opinion, that kind of data should be protected by at least Two-factor Authentication. My bank demands the combination of a pincode (something you know), a bankcard (something you have) and a hardware token (also something you have), which is considered strong authentication.