linux accounting software or cheap winxp

Peter Dobratz peter at dobratz.us
Fri Feb 13 21:06:50 EST 2009


On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 8:13 PM,  <VirginSnow at vfemail.net> wrote:
>> From: Lloyd Kvam <python at venix.com>
>> Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 18:29:27 -0500
>
>> I could not find any adequate business accounting packages for Linux.
>
> There's a GTK-based (gnome-based glade-based guile-based...)
> accounting package called Gnucash (www.gnucash.org).

My wife and I have been using Gnucash at home for the past 2 1/2
years.  We're running the version that can be had with apt-get on
Ubuntu.  We're using this strictly for personal finance purposes.  The
reason we went with Gnucash is because of the $0 cost.  Also, we can
run it remotely using X11 on our Mac laptop when it's convenient.

Overall, it seems to be somewhat rough around the edges, but it serves
our purpose.  We started with almost no knowledge of accounting, so we
got a short tutorial on accounting from the Gnucash manual (assets,
liabilities, income, expenses).  I've had some brief exposure to
QuickBooks and it seems like they use the same concepts.  They have a
bunch of reports defined that you can use (transaction report, balance
sheet, etc).  These do have some options that you can change in the
GUI, but we've found that sometimes it's easier to just use a
spreadsheet to get exactly what we want.  Currently, we're using the
manual process of one of us reading out numbers and the other one
entering them into a spreadsheet.  This would seem inefficient, but we
use this as an opportunity to review each line item.

If you want to do more advanced customizations of reports or invoices,
then you might have to brush up on your Scheme skills and edit the
source code of the report.

For what it's worth, I think they are trying to target the needs of
the business user and many of the new features seem to be geared
towards businesses.  Also, recently, they've ported it to Windows and
are releasing Windows binaries with each release.

> That is, except for the crashes.  For reasons only my CPU may ever
> know, Gnucash decided to crash every ten or so transactions I entered
> into it.  My workaround was to save early and often, but it eventually
> got to be so annoying that I stopped using Gnucash all together.
> Current versions may be more stable.  The one I was using wasn't.

I think Gnucash has gotten better since you used it.  We've gotten in
the habit of saving after each transaction because it used to crash
more often.  I filed a bug report on Ubuntu about one persistant crash
and it turned out to be an inconsistancy in one of the libraries that
Gnucash was using.  That problem was fixed in the next release of
Ubuntu.  We used to have crashes every other time we used it, but now
I can't remember the last time it has crashed (Gnucash 2.2.4 on Ubuntu
8.04).

Peter


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