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Coming soon: gnucash 1.8
When attention turns to what Linux needs if it is ever to attain desktop
World Domination, the first thing that comes to mind is usually office
suites. But personal and business finance software is also an important
part of a desktop system. The state of the art for Linux financial
applications has always lagged far behind what can be found in the
proprietary world, and that deficit certainly does not help get Linux onto
more desktops.
The leading free finance package for Linux is gnucash. LWN has looked at gnucash a couple of times in the past, and your editor has used it for his (depressing) finances for almost three years. Gnucash gets the job done, but it long lacked the features found in commercial finance programs; it has also never been something that could challenge small business packages like Quickbooks. The gnucash developers have not been idle, however; much work has gone into the 1.8 release, which is due to hit the net on January 5. When the 1.7.4 beta release was announced, your editor grabbed a copy to see what the gnucash team has been up to.
As a personal finance application, gnucash 1.8 is truly ready for prime time. All it needs is a few rough edges filed off, and a small set of additional features (i.e. budgeting), and it will be fully competitive with the proprietary packages. As a business accounting package, gnucash has some ground to cover yet. This is actually an interesting state of affairs: gnucash has had many of the basics, such as double-entry accounting and an (almost undocumented) PostgreSQL backend, for a long time. Conversations with the gnucash developers indicate the the new gnucash business features are the results of a single developer's efforts. Can it be that the free software community is unable to come up with the resources to build a top-quality business accounting package on top of a proven platform? We should be able to do better than that. gnucash will eventually be able to address the business market - the code has been slowly but steadily getting better for years. In the mean time, there really is no need to use proprietary packages for personal finance; gnucash 1.8 will be more than good enough. (Log in to post comments)
Grammar usage: eg vs ie Posted Dec 4, 2002 21:45 UTC (Wed) by simon_kitching (guest, #4874) [Link] Don't you hate people criticising grammar ? :-)
However, this one is getting so prevalent (and LWN is such a shining light of journalism) I can't resist:
I believe both usages of "i.e." below should be "e.g.": The acronym "i.e." implies that the explanation you are making is the only possible explanation, while "e.g." is an example. If payroll were the only lacking feature, then "i.e." would be appropriate. Sorry :-)
Grammar usage: eg vs ie Posted Dec 11, 2002 14:45 UTC (Wed) by Pananix (guest, #8512) [Link] As I'm a bit of kibitzer myself, so I'll see your grammar and raise you punctuation.BTW, I only mildly despise people who correct grammar, and only when their punctuation is hosed ;-). The abbreviations e.g., i.e., et. al., are _always_ followed by a comma. Only your definitions contain the correct punctuation. If you're going to criticize, it would be best to get it all correct: grammar, spelling, and punctuation. (And depending on your source for punctuation, the comma following the word spelling in the previous sentence is correct -- or not.)
Grammar usage: eg vs ie Posted Dec 13, 2002 8:48 UTC (Fri) by sl70 (guest, #1585) [Link] I'll see your punctuation and raise you pedantry.Technically, there should be no period after the ``et'' in et al., as et (meaning ``and'') is a complete word in Latin. Similarly, etc., back in the old days, was written et c. (with a space and no `.' after et), standing for et cetera (meaning ``and other things''). And if we're going to get REALLY picky (OK, I'm getting really picky), etc. should be used to mean ``and other (inanimate) things'' and et al. (from et alia) should be used to mean ``and other people.'' I find et al. frequently misused where etc. should be used.
Dependencies Posted Dec 4, 2002 21:46 UTC (Wed) by torsten (guest, #4137) [Link] Last I read, installing GNUcash meant dependency hell - mostly because of many, varied, necessary libraries that must be installed. I would have preferred mention of these.I run a minimum system, I don't like to have extra crap lying around. Knowing how much goes into using this package would be helpful.
Dependencies Posted Dec 5, 2002 2:01 UTC (Thu) by aglet (guest, #1334) [Link] "Dependency hell" as you call it could also be called modularity and code re-use... the fact that you don't actually have anything else that also uses GNUcash's dependencies is perhaps a shame, but is your disk space really that precious? It is a heavyweight desktop application, after all, not some embedded application.If managing the dependencies is a problem, take it up with your distribution vendor -- most modern distributions have some mechanism (eg up2date, apt-get dist-upgrade) for dealing with it... Would you rather have a giant opaque GNUcash package containing specific versions of the libraries it uses?
Dependencies Posted Dec 5, 2002 2:16 UTC (Thu) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link] It *is* a problem. Case in point. I had Mandrake 8.1 and wanted to run the newest gnucash, this was when my distro was maybe 5 months old or so.urpmi gnucash* Complained that it needed to upgrade ~25 libraries, about 5 of which urpmi knew of no source for. No problem I said, go ahead. But then it turned out that this would break many of my older applications, so they would *also* need to be upgraded. In principle it should be possible to have two different versions of the same lib, in practice this works sometimes, and othertimes not. So, to run this one program I would have been forced to:
This is not a reasonable amount of effort to put into installing a single program. What it means in practice is that I, and probably very many others, have completely given up on trying out new betas and CVS-versions and suchlike of Gnucash, and instead stick with the version that comes in our distro and "just works". This is a pity, because it reduces the amount of testing a new version gets before it becomes the official one.
Dependencies Posted Dec 5, 2002 2:59 UTC (Thu) by aglet (guest, #1334) [Link] Ah, but beta testing is different to just wanting to run the application (which is what I nuderstood the previous poster to be saying). Perhaps you should keep a small "bleeding edge" partition if you can't manage to keep your stable stuff working as well as running recent betas? Maybe a switch in distribution would help -- I drag in a few packages from the Debian unstable & testing distributions into my stable laptop, it seems to work fine...
Dependencies Posted Dec 5, 2002 5:04 UTC (Thu) by ranger (guest, #6415) [Link] Debain isn't the only distro out there of course. There's no need to switch distros, upgrading to Mandrake 9.0 should be sufficient, at most the user could add a cooker source to urpmi to install the required libraries (and remove it afterwards, to prevent getting a whole bunch of other possibly semi-broken software).But, installing the deps on a pre-Gnome2 distro to be able to run a development version of GTK/Gnome software is probably not feasible, at least not without requiring upgrades on much of the software (since many of the dependencies are complex, to allow gnome1.x software to co-exist with Gnome2 may require upgrading Gnome1.x libraries, requiring software depending on those libraries to be upgraded also). Why doesn't one see this with KDE though, I wonder ...
Dependencies Posted Dec 11, 2002 16:22 UTC (Wed) by Wilddev (guest, #8514) [Link] I'm not quite sure what you're implying here, but GnuCash 1.8.0 is a GNOME 1.4 application and doesn't require any GNOME2 libraries. Also as someone actively involved in GNOME I know that GNOME 1.4 and GNOME2 happily co-exist allowing you to run applications developed for either platform as required.
Dependencies Posted Dec 11, 2002 16:18 UTC (Wed) by Wilddev (guest, #8514) [Link] I'd like to point out that mdk 8.1 _comes_ with GnuCash 1.6.2. The only dependency problems you should encounter with the new version of GnuCash over the one supplied as part of mdk 8.1 is an upgraded g-wrap library. There is no 25 library upgrade problem. If, however, you are running KDE as your desktop, then of course as GnuCash has currently only a GNOME 1.4 based front end you will need to install enough of GNOME to run it. (a KDE developer has recently started working on a KDE based interface for the GnuCash engine incidentally).There is quite a bit of misinformation about GnuCash's requirements out there. GnuCash is no more difficult to install with GNOME 1.4 already installed than any of the other GNOME Office applications (Gnumeric, Evolution, Abiword, etc).
Dependencies Posted Dec 18, 2002 10:54 UTC (Wed) by dbreakey (guest, #1381) [Link] This is not a library issue, but a packaging issue; unfortunately, I don't think that anyone has come up with a reasonable, usable solution for this. Consider the following:
Therefore, in order to continue producing a distribution that meets their desired level of quality (whatever that might be), most vendors only spend their time testing and validating the latest—or at least whatever point on the curve they want to be at; some vendors prefer to hang back a bit from the absolute latest sutff, while others like to live on the bleeding edge—releases of any given application. The downside to this is that users, in order to upgrade to the latest version of one particular application, may be required to upgrade a large portion of their system in order to satisfy dependancies—dependancies which are determined by the vendor and hard-coded into the package information. If you don't want to do this, you may want to start using one of the increasing number of "build from source" distributions, which will probably give you far more control over the exact content of your system.
Gtk2 planned for 1.9.x? Posted Dec 4, 2002 22:31 UTC (Wed) by Strike (guest, #861) [Link] I know that this is sort of a more "minor" issue, but when is the GTK2 port scheduled? Does anyone know? Yes, I realize that for now, GnuCash is concentrating on catching up in the feature arena. But, for those of us who are perfectly content with its feature set, it might be nice to begin down the path that all the other big GTK/GNOME apps (Evolution, Galeon, GIMP, XChat, etc.) have started down - the GTK2 port path. Granted, Evolution hasn't officially started porting yet (at least, there's no 1.3 branch in CVS that I know of ... yet), but it has been announced as their intent. In fact, it's their sole intent for this branch.
Gtk2 planned for 1.9.x? Posted Dec 11, 2002 16:24 UTC (Wed) by Wilddev (guest, #8514) [Link] GNOME2 development will start once we have completed work on 1.8 probably early next year.
Everyone who is fluent in Scheme, raise your hand... Posted Dec 4, 2002 23:03 UTC (Wed) by dank (guest, #1865) [Link] The editor asks why few people are contributing to GnuCash.One possible reason is it's largely written in Scheme, a language known by few. The GnuCash crew all love Scheme and would rather quit the project than use any other language. Result: a program nobody has much of a chance of understanding. I do wish them well; perhaps they will singlehandedly save Scheme from oblivion.
Everyone who is fluent in Scheme, raise your hand... Posted Dec 5, 2002 2:06 UTC (Thu) by aglet (guest, #1334) [Link] *raises hand*The Sawmill window manager is also a heavy user of Scheme. And Emacs Lisp is not hugely different. I have no idea how many bazillion lines of Emacs Lisp have been written.... Incidentally, anyone wanting to learn Scheme could do worse than fiddle with either Sawfish or Emacs, alternatively if you prefer books pick up a copy of the MIT textbook "structure and interpretation of computer programs".
Everyone who is fluent in Scheme, raise your hand... Posted Dec 5, 2002 9:10 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link] /raise my hand.Don't need gnucash, though. Joachim
Everyone who is fluent in Scheme, raise your hand... Posted Dec 5, 2002 13:48 UTC (Thu) by jdavisp3 (guest, #4881) [Link] This is a very common misconception about GnuCash.There are pieces of GnuCash, such as reports and graphs, Everyone fluent in C raise your hand...
Everyone who is fluent in Scheme, raise your hand... Posted Dec 11, 2002 17:14 UTC (Wed) by conrad_c (guest, #8516) [Link] As others have pointed out, large chunks of the application are coded in languages other than scheme. But even if that wasn't the case, is coding the only way to contribute?Hands up all those fluent in a real-world language, like, say English (or even American.. :-)). Our docs can always use an extra pair of eyes (although the current docs developer is doing a fantastic job). And theres plenty of translation work to be done.
Coming soon: gnucash 1.8 Posted Dec 5, 2002 2:24 UTC (Thu) by zitran (guest, #5254) [Link] To your question:"LWN is currently looking for a Linux-based accounting package (suggestions, anybody?)" Have a look at sql-ledger.org. This one is written in perl and a lot seems to be going on here. Current version is 1.8.7 but 2.0 is scheduled for release in mid December. sql-ledger is browser operated, features multiple user support with individual rights and is based on PostgreSQL, with options for Oracle available and DB2 in the "tube". The program has been localised to quite a few languages and countries. We are ourselves just installing it for production use and have added a few things to it as well (Finnish localisation with DES-crypted bank connection, Finnish standard chart of accounts as well as P&L and Balance statements according to Finnish accounting legislation (these are quite structured) The feature I miss most is payroll, which I hope will start developing soon. Best rgds Paul Saris
Coming soon: gnucash 1.8 Posted Dec 12, 2002 0:46 UTC (Thu) by Kluge (subscriber, #2881) [Link] I don't know anything about business accounting, but the people at Linuxworld (www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2002/0225.xterminal13.html, www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2002/0311.xterminal14.html) seem to think that NOLA (nola.noguska.com) is good enough to consider for their own use.
Coming soon: gnucash 1.8 Posted Dec 12, 2002 11:13 UTC (Thu) by joib (guest, #8541) [Link] In addition to sql-ledger (which is quite nice) there is also compiere (www.compiere.org). It is based on java, and unfortunately requires oracle. But they're working on a postgresql port, due 1H2003.Compiere is more like a full-fledged erp application, it includes lots of stuff besides accounting. Then there's also gnu enterprise (www.gnue.org), which is more like an appserver+form builder etc, but they plan to include an accounting package eventually.
Coming soon: gnucash 1.8 Posted Dec 17, 2002 14:11 UTC (Tue) by palin (guest, #8654) [Link] SQL-Ledger 2.0 is already out.
Too much accounting, too little budgetting Posted Dec 5, 2002 7:16 UTC (Thu) by nstraz (subscriber, #1592) [Link] I tried GNUcash recently and I don't like how everything is pushed into accounts. I want to track my existing bank accounts and loans, not manage a ledger for a small business. I want to look into the future to see what my cash flow will look like when I have to take unpaid time off. I haven't been able to find an application like this on Linux yet.I'll make one recommendation. Make it easier to import data! It's a real pain to categorize a year's worth of transactions. If I could look at the list of transactions in detail and "paint" the transactions from a palette of categories it would make it much easier to get started.
Tried Quasar Accounting? Posted Dec 5, 2002 7:26 UTC (Thu) by Webexcess (subscriber, #197) [Link] I've been testing the free-beer version of Quasar Accounting (www.linuxcanada.com), and I like what I've seen so far. The commercial version includes a POS interface and inventory tracking system -- two very desirable features.Is there anything this complete in the FS/OSS world? Has anyone had any good/bad experience with this software?
Tried Quasar Accounting? Posted Dec 18, 2002 7:37 UTC (Wed) by diacobel (guest, #8666) [Link] I have been running Quasar for over a year now and love it. I cannot wait for v1.3 to come out.
Coming soon: gnucash 1.8 Posted Dec 5, 2002 8:00 UTC (Thu) by mcatkins (subscriber, #4270) [Link] One thing that hasn't been mentioned, as far as I've seen, isthat until gnucash supports VAT, it won't be even on the list for consideration for most companies here in Europe. This is *much* more important for me than, say, payroll. I am, of course, assuming that VAT hasn't been added in this new I just wish *I* had time to add it... :-( Martin
WHAT IS VAT? Posted Dec 5, 2002 9:20 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] Sorry for the lack of info in a post ,but what is VAT?
WHAT IS VAT? Posted Dec 5, 2002 9:31 UTC (Thu) by a9db0 (subscriber, #2181) [Link] VAT is the acronym for Value Added Tax, which is levied widely across Europe.
WHAT IS VAT? Posted Dec 6, 2002 7:24 UTC (Fri) by nowster (subscriber, #67) [Link] Sales tax, which unlike in the US, is the "label price" of a product.Businesses can recover the VAT they pay for goods and services against the VAT they pay to the tax man on goods and services that they sell.
Coming soon: gnucash 1.8 Posted Dec 11, 2002 16:26 UTC (Wed) by Wilddev (guest, #8514) [Link] I'm not sure if VAT has additional requirements over the US state tax requirements, but it should be very easy with the new small business module to track VAT.
GnuCash and QIF import/export Posted Dec 5, 2002 11:54 UTC (Thu) by scripter (subscriber, #2654) [Link] QIF import/export is an important, and lacking feature of GnuCash (as of version 1.6 or so -- I don't know about later versions).I tried using GnuCash during the 1.5 and 1.6 days. In the past, I used CBB to do my personal finances, but it was degrading with updates to my OS, and it ran too slowly with my data. I exported my data from CBB into a QIF file, and attempted to import it into GnuCash. It didn't work well. After I had added some new transactions, and decided that I wanted to move to something else, I found that GnuCash couldn't export the data into a QIF file. I'm used to proprietary packages holding my data hostage. In this case, GnuCash held my data hostage, and I ended up abandoning the data.
GnuCash and QIF import/export Posted Dec 11, 2002 13:44 UTC (Wed) by zImage (guest, #8511) [Link] <quote>I'm used to proprietary packages holding my data hostage. In this case, GnuCash held my data hostage, and I ended up abandoning the data. </quote> The data was in XML format which is quite easy to read and change and do stuff with. This is not the same as, for example, a doc file which is a closed and quite secret file format. Just because gnucash wouldn't export the data to your file format of choice, doesn't mean it held it hostage. Gnucash set your data free. You're the one who wanted to tie it up again.
GnuCash and QIF import/export Posted Dec 17, 2002 16:36 UTC (Tue) by whelk1 (guest, #3293) [Link] .DOC is proprietary, but not secret.
GnuCash and QIF import/export Posted Dec 11, 2002 16:29 UTC (Wed) by Wilddev (guest, #8514) [Link] We are planning a data export function for sometime in the 1.8 release series. Its not there yet but definately planned.
Coming soon: gnucash 1.8 Posted Dec 12, 2002 6:38 UTC (Thu) by jpmcc (subscriber, #2452) [Link] "ThinSoft Accounting consists of seven robust modules with unique functions that integrate with the system as a whole. This creates a complete package for all of your firm's accounting and distribution needs."ThinSoft is now free and in the process of being converted to OpenSource. It will be the first Enterprise Accounting System in the world that is OpenSource." From the Thinsoft website.
Accounting Package for LWN Posted Dec 17, 2002 9:25 UTC (Tue) by km4hr (guest, #8644) [Link] You say LWN is looking for an accounting package? I have installed and recommend SQL-Ledger. (See sql-ledger.org). This package is in regular use in our small family business. Other users are listed on the sql-ledger web site. Comments from an accountant working with the family business indicate the package is comparable to expensive professional products.
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![[Scheduled transaction window]](/images/ns/st-sm.png)