GnuCash 2.0.0 Released

tashanna writes "After a very welcome GTK2 conversion and some additional feature hacking, GnuCash has released version 2.0.0. Other notable changes include: 'OFX DirectConnect which can directly retrieve and import account statements over the Internet, a "Hide account" feature to keep a better overview of your current accounts tabbed window functionality, the ability to create budgets within GnuCash using your account data, support for Accounting Periods, the data file format has been improved with respect to international characters data files with international characters can be transferred to other countries flawlessly, GnuCash Help and Guide are now fully integrated with the GNOME Help system (Yelp).'"

GNUcash

[joe 155]

I wasn't too sure what GNUCash was from the summery and the article seems to have gone down, if you're wondering:

GnuCash is an application to keep track of your finances. GnuCash is a personal finance manager. A check-book like register GUI allows you to enter and track bank accounts, stocks, income and even currency trades. The interface is designed to be simple and easy to use, but is backed with double-entry accounting principles to ensure balanced books.

That's from yum, although 2.0.0 isn't in the fedora repositories yet (well, not; livna, core, extras or updates)

kmymoney

[Wh_TiGER]

I've been evaluating OSS solution and I found this one pretty interesting. Polished and yet, powerful.

http://kmymoney2.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

I'll certainly give a try to Gnucash 2.0 anyway.

Re:Great for...

[stefanlasiewski]

So I think you made a bad assumption there :P

GnuCash is NOT available for Windows yet. It may be available in the future, or it may be possible to compile your own.

According to the wiki: "FAQ: Is it possible to compile GnuCash on Windows? A: Currently, no".

the official announcement

[pintpusher]

from gnucash-users list:

    Accounting in Linux Leaps Forward

*/GnuCash 2.0.0 milestone released to public/*

Personal and small business accounting in Linux will be easier and
better after today's release of GnuCash 2.0.0.
This milestone release of the free, open source accounting program
includes generational advances over the last version. GnuCash 2.0.0 is
based on state-of-the-art gtk2 GUI technology. Developers worked hard to
integrate the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) for a consistent
behaviour and look-and-feel for the whole Desktop.
Major changes in the milestone release include;
        * OFX DirectConnect which can directly retrieve and import account
            statements over the Internet.
        * A "Hide account" feature to keep a better overview of your current
            accounts tabbed window functionality.
        * The ability to create budgets within GnuCash using your account data.
        * Support for Accounting Periods.
        * The data file format has been improved with respect to
            international characters. Data files with international characters
            can be transferred to other countries flawlessly.
        * GnuCash Help and Guide are now fully integrated with the GNOME
            Help system (Yelp).
The GnuCash development team said these new features and changes will
make GnuCash easier than ever for newcomers.
GnuCash is the leading free, open source accounting program and the leap
to gtk2 will enable users to be able to enjoy cutting edge functionality
with the freedom of not being locked into proprietory file formats.

*Playing With Others*
As with other leading Linux software that is designed to replace
proprietory programs, GnuCash is a functional replacement for expensive
accounting programs. Like OpenOffice.org and The Gimp, GnuCash is also
programmed to communicate and interact with as many existing programs,
institutions and people as possible.
The GnuCash development team has continued to improve file import
filters, which allow users to import work from old programs like
Microsoft Money and Quicken. GnuCash can load QIF and QFX files, which
are used by both of those programs.
Developers have also continued to incorporate support for online banking
into the program. GnuCash 2.0.0 supports OFX DirectConnect which can
directly retrieve and import account statements over the Internet.
The milestone release is available in 29 languages, including English,
French, German, Spanish, Norwegian, so people from around the world will
have no difficulty operating the program

*Off on the Right Foot*
Users of the GnuCash 2.0.0 will notice a few changes when they start the
program. Improvements have been made on startup speed, scheduled
transactions, currency support and currency quote retrievals.
After they enter the program, users will find a double-ledger account
system, exhaustive report options and account hierarchy tools. Also at
their disposal is a full system of tutorials and documentation.

*Getting GnuCash*
GnuCash 2.0.0 can be downloaded from gnucash.org. It is available as
source code.
To install GnuCash, users will need Gnome 2, guile, slib and g-wrap.

*http://www.gnucash.org *

*http://download.sourceforge.net/gnucash
*

*About the Program*
GnuCash is a free, open source accounting program released under the GNU
General Public License (GPL) and available for GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris
and Mac OSX. It is collaboratively developed by 10 people from over 5
countries.

Programming on GnuCash began in 1997, and its first stable release was
in 1998.

Working download link

[Anonymous Coward]

While the GnuCash.org site remains a steaming radioactive crater, you can at least download the sources [sourceforge.net] from SourceForge.net.

Re:Where's KCash?

[nonmaskable]

http://kmymoney2.sourceforge.net/index-home.html [sourceforge.net]

Re:Gnome Office?

[iburrell]

All three of them use the goffice libraries. They have a lot of interface similarities because they are Gnome applications. They are pretty much independent projects.

turbocash

[Anonymous Coward]

i have quite a few clients running
http://www.turbocashuk.com/ [turbocashuk.com]

open source, windows (iam suprised this never gets much publicity)

unless of course you want to mess about with horrible unix kludges on windows in which case gnuCash will suit you fine

Re:What about us Brits?

[Anonymous Coward]

You should give Gnucash another chance. Gnucash, if anything, has a European emphasis. Most of the major developers are in Germany, transaction downloading works best with European banks (sometimes not at all with US banks), etc. It uses standard double-entry accounting terminology, however, and that may be quite confusing if you've never seen it before. However, on the positive side, Gnucash does come with a very good manual (a rarity for free software) that also gives a decent introduction to standard accounting concepts.

I didn't see the need for double-entry accounting until I had to act as executor for someone's estate with a troubled history. Putting all the various pieces of information together into one coherent financial report would have been very challenging with a single-entry tool like Quicken. For average users, however, it may be overkill.

Moneydance

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried gnucash a few times and alwasy found it lacking and was forced to use Quicken in Crossover Office. Finally sometime earlier this year I read a post that mentioned Moneydance (http://www.moneydance.com) and gave the trial version a try. Its not quite as feature rich as Quicken but has all the features I needed and I ended up buying a lic for it. I have used it now for about four months I think and have been very happy with it. It runs on Windows, Linux, and MacOS X. I'm not trolling or really even promoting but I just figued with the lack of good accounting apps out there for linux (at least on the personal finances side) I would mention it. I do hope that gnucash has improved with this realease but for now I'll probably stick with Moneydance.

Oh, and yes it is java but the install was quick and painless and it runs quick (for me at least).

No online banking? Why not?

[pestie]

6. DO NOT bank online. Evar

Uh... why not? I've been banking online for years and never once had a single incidence of fraud. Of course, I switched to running Linux full-time a year or so ago, but even when I was running WinXP I had no problems. Of course, I also somehow avoided getting spyware or viruses, too (probably due to the fact that I was a devotee of Mozilla/Firefox). It's surprising to me to hear this kind of attitude on Slashdot, since most people here are clueful enough about security to know how to avoid getting burned.

Why I'm switching from Microsoft Money

[Anonymous Coward]

I was an Quicken user for many years despite their regular releases which seemed to
add no new features, just fix existing bugs.
Then the whole TurboTax 2002/C-Dilla copy protection debacle happened and I swore off Intuit forever.

Last week I purchased Microsoft Money hoping to get something like Quicken. Hoo boy.
In 3 days of usage so far, I've found:

1) Registration is only allowed with a checkbox reading "I agree to let Microsoft
contact me about updates and special offers." There is no way to uncouple bug
fix updates from Microsoft spam.

2) Money requires you to use Passport in conjunction with their online features and
in fact this is the default mode for Money 2006, resulting in:
a) Money storing your personal banking details (not passwords, but balances and transactions)
on Microsoft's servers by default,
b) Money "protecting" this information using Passport, a system that has been hacked
before and will be hacked again and which limits the length and therefore strength of your passwords,
c) Money insisting on turning the "store my things on MS servers" mode *every time* you try to
add another on-line service (i.e. a new bank or credit-card) resulting in
numerous repitions of the "add a bank", restore some semblance of privacy dance.

3) If Money has a way to automatically propogate changes for transaction categorization,
it isn't obvious or offered by default. If I drink a Starbucks coffee 6 times a month,
categorizing the first means nothing for the rest; you have to do every one by hand.
Quicken would forever remember these sorts of associations.

4) Despite apparently using Yodlee under the covers, MS Money doesn't offer
either a) a way to synchronize or import your data using Yodlee, or b) access to systems
available in Yodlee.

Re:Great for...

[jsled]

Budgets: yes (new in 2.0)
Scheduled/recurring transactions: yes (since 1.8)

No, it doesn't have the polish of Commercial Software, but it's improving.

Re:what about a QuickBooks replacement?

[pintpusher]

1.) Import my existing Quickbooks data from the last 2-3 years.

hopeless. That's the only reason I maintain my stupid winxp dualboot setup -- for access to 4 years of business transactions that are forever locked up in quickbooks. bleh.

Re:Great for...

[nharmon]

For many of us, the cost of using Quicken also involves switching to financial institutions who pay Intuit's .QFX ransom. You do know what .QFX is, right? It is .OFX (an XML-based transactions format) with a couple of Quicken-specific tags that tells quicken that the bank is paid up. It used to be not a big deal since you could use .QIF files to import transactions. But starting in 2005, that is no longer an option.

Try and call up Quicken and ask them why...both as a financial institution and as a customer. You will get all sorts of laughable excuses like ".QFX makes the files you get from your bank more secure", or "we don't use OFX because it isn't secure". As if their additions to the file makes it secure (it doesn't, not even from a integrity standpoint because every customer gets the same, or similiar tags).

Not quite hopeless.. here is what I did

[Xehn]

1.) Import my existing Quickbooks data from the last 2-3 years.

hopeless. That's the only reason I maintain my stupid winxp dualboot setup -- for access to 4 years of business transactions that are forever locked up in quickbooks. bleh.

Not hopeless, at my office I used a (windows) program by a company called 'Digital Cows [digitalcows.com]' to export all of my QB data into a 'plays nice with others' format. (I used CSV and imported to mysql, I think it supports xls, but I've never used it). It's not free, I had to have my employer cover it, but it's a nice simple option.

There is also the quickbooks SDK [intuit.com], which IS free. With a little work, you can export all of your data.

Intuit sure doesn't make it easy, but it is certinally not hopeless.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with any of the above programs or companies.

Re:GNUcash

[ceswiedler]

You don't have to enter anything twice. Everything is a single transaction which refers to two accounts. So as soon as you enter something saying "$200 from Checking into Expenses" there is automatically a "$200 into Expenses from Checking". It's just two ways of looking at the same transaction.

Re:Great for...

[OctaneZ]

Yes, with Cygwin and X it should be possible to forward this or any other X application. Just make sure your server (your /etc/ssh/sshd_config or equivalent file) has X Forwarding turned on, it should have "X11Forwarding yes" in the file. And that at the client end you are requesting X forwarding, by either making it the default action for ssh or by using the "-X" flag.
-OZ

Re:Great for...

[ichimunki]

Not only is it possible to use GnuCash on Windows using Cygwin's X Server. That's how I've been doing it for some time now with very good results. The only problem I've ever had is with default window sizes for non-maximized windows--probably from having a much larger screen resolution on the Windows system than the Linux system that gets X forwarded.

As far as I'm concerned GnuCash is one of the big reasons I've managed to avoid bankruptcy in the past. It's standard approach to accounting and reports was very helpful for me when I got into financial trouble in the past. Seeing this announcement for 2.0 is heartening, and a good reminder that it's time to donate to the developers' beer fund (or whatever they spend donations on).

Re:Cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets see what this does to my bandwidth.

http://lynema.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/06/Scree nshot-gnucase2%20-%20Unspecified.png [lynema.com]
http://lynema.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/06/Scree nshot-gnucase2%20-%20Register.png [lynema.com]
http://lynema.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/06/Scree nshot-gnucase2%20-%20Gas.png [lynema.com]
http://lynema.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/06/Scree nshot-gnucase2%20-%20Expense%20Accounts.png [lynema.com]

Re:And you thought physicists were boring

[cookiepus]

Both HSBC Direct and EmigrantDirect are paying slightly over 5% currently. INGDirect which used to offer higher yields, is lower, at about 4.25% or so. Your bank is probably half that.

In general, Emigrant has been higher than Emigrant in the past. Now that HSBC is in the picture, they have consistently been at the top of the payoff, with Emigrant catching up quickly.

Either way, much better than your local bank. The first 100k of each account is FDIC insured. Transfers between any of these accounts and your bank take about 3 days. HSBC also gives you and ATM card.

too many libs

[joschm0]

When I last tried GnuCase (3 years ago), the biggest complaint about gnucash was that it depended on approximately 50 external libraries. It seemed to be a conglomeration of parts written in every existing language and toolkit. That reason alone sometimes made for an unstable application crashing at unexpected times. I hope they've cleaned it since then.

Here's The Fix:

[DaftShadow]

Tell them you use Quicken or MS Money :)

http://moneydance.com/pipermail/moneydance-info/20 06-June/008033.html [moneydance.com]

User experience thus far is that you should be able to use moneydance just fine, as long as you get them to allow you OFX access. I have no personal experience with this issue though, so good luck. - DaftShadow

Re:what about a QuickBooks replacement?

[scarolan]

Get yourself a copy of VMWare workstation, or if you can't afford that get VMWare player and have someone make an image file for you. About 3-4 gigs ought to be enough. Install windows xp onto the image file, and you can use Quickbooks in your VMWare virtual machine without having to dual-boot. The only thing you should need dual-booting for these days is games. :)

Re:too many libs

[jsled]

To mutilate a famous phrase, "Reports of gnucash's dependency problems are greatly exaggerated".

In any case, it's better than before, but you just can't get away from writing desktop software without using other libs to accomplish things like HTML rendering, printing, graphing, xml parsing, &c.

In any case, here's the dependency list from my gentoo install with optional OFX, HBCI support and quotes-fetching turned on; note that most of the packages are standard (zlib, popt) or just "part of gnome" (gtk, glib, gnome*).

=app-text/docbook-xml-dtd-4.1.2* app-text/docbook-xml-dtd-4.1.2-r6
>=app-text/scrollkeeper-0.3 app-text/scrollkeeper-0.3.14-r2
>=dev-libs/g-wrap-1.3.4 dev-libs/g-wrap-1.9.6
>=dev-libs/glib-2.4.0 dev-libs/glib-2.8.6
>=dev-libs/libxml2-2.5.10 dev-libs/libxml2-2.6.23
>=dev-libs/popt-1.5 dev-libs/popt-1.7-r1
>=dev-libs/slib-2.3.8 dev-libs/slib-2.4.3
>=dev-util/guile-1.6 dev-util/guile-1.6.7
>=gnome-base/gconf-2 gnome-base/gconf-2.12.1
>=gnome-base/libglade-2.4 gnome-base/libglade-2.5.1
>=gnome-base/libgnomeprint-2.10 gnome-base/libgnomeprint-2.12.1
>=gnome-base/libgnomeprintui-2.10 gnome-base/libgnomeprintui-2.12.1
>=gnome-base/libgnomeui-2.4 gnome-base/libgnomeui-2.12.0
>=gnome-extra/gtkhtml-3.6 gnome-extra/gtkhtml-3.8.2
>=sys-apps/sed-4 sys-apps/sed-4.1.4-r1
>=sys-libs/zlib-1.1.4 sys-libs/zlib-1.2.3
>=x11-libs/goffice-0.0.4 x11-libs/goffice-0.1.0
>=x11-libs/gtk+-2.4 x11-libs/gtk+-2.8.12
dev-util/pkgconfig dev-util/pkgconfig-0.20
nls?
    sys-devel/gettext sys-devel/gettext-0.14.4
doc?
    app-doc/doxygen app-doc/doxygen-1.4.4
    app-text/docbook-xsl-stylesheets app-text/docbook-xsl-stylesheets-1.68.1-r1
ofx?
    >=dev-libs/libofx-0.7.0 dev-libs/libofx-0.8.0-r1
quotes?
    dev-perl/Crypt-SSLeay dev-perl/Crypt-SSLeay-0.51
    dev-perl/Finance-Quote dev-perl/Finance-Quote-1.11
    dev-perl/HTML-TableExtract dev-perl/HTML-TableExtract-2.06
hbci?
    net-libs/aqbanking net-libs/aqbanking-1.6.0_beta

Re:GNUcash

[benoitg]

Not many, that's what QIF, OFX and OFC downloads, as well as OFX Direct Connect and HBCI are for. Gnucash will simply ask you what each of your transaction was spent on, as it already knows what account it's from. It will even do bayesian filtering the next time you import to try and guess it for you.

Re:What about us Brits?

[BovineSpirit]

Brits are well represented in GNUcash development, and there's a en_GB translation. The wonderfully named Nigel Titley has been using it for VAT invoices and submitting bugs, while Neil Williams is a major contributer. The developers and testers are from an array of countries, so any US bias tends to be dealt with quickley.

Too much hassle to install

[scarolan]

I gave it my best shot but this software is way too much of a pain in the arse to get installed. This one of the main reasons people will not switch to Linux, and well, they're right!

I attempted to install Gnucash 2.0 on a computer running CentOS 4.3, and after going through 30 minutes of dependency hell to get all the required programs installed so I could compile Gnucash, I finally got a fatal error stating that g-wrap wasn't working properly.

Maybe I'll try again later if someone creates an RPM installer, because I don't have time to mess around with the C compiler and obscure config files.

Re:I have used both; I prefer GnuCash over KMyMone

[advocate_one]

I am looking forward to GnuCash v2 appearing in the Ubuntu repositories.

unfortunately, it won't go into Dapper... it'll be in Edgy. For Dapper, you'll have to request the backport team for it to be put in Dapper backports or else some kind soul will package it and make it available on an unsupported repository.

that's how I've got the most recent KMyMoney, someone has packaged it and stuck it on their own repository.