Development [LWN.net]

Buddi - Personal finance software for the rest of us

By Forrest Cook
August 15, 2007

Buddi is a cross-platform financial program that was written by Wyatt Olson. The project news shows the first beta release came out in May, 2006. [Buddi]

Buddi is a personal finance and budgeting program, aimed at those who have little or no financial background. In making this software, I have attempted to make things as simple as possible, while still retaining enough functions to satisfy most home users. Buddi is released as Open Source Software.

Buddi will run on almost any computer which has a Java virtual machine installed. This can include Windows, Macintosh OS X, Linux, and many other operating systems. Buddi is currently available in Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

The feature list for Buddi includes:

Personal data files are optionally password-encrypted.
There is a GUI interface for data entry and system control.
Reports and graphs are displayed in a web browser window.
Buddi keeps track of financial accounts.
Income and Expenses are stored by Budget Categories.
Financial data is entered as Transactions.
A number of Reports and Graphs are available for analyzing the data.
Finance data can be Backed up and Restored, it is easy to recall previous backups.
Buddi can keep track of User Preferences.
The system can keep track of Prepaid Liability Accounts.
Scheduled Transactions are available for tracking automatic expenses.
Third-party Plugins can be added for extending the software.

See the online screenshots for a look at the software in action. More information on Buddi is available from the FAQ document.

Buddi installation was trivial on an Ubuntu 7.04 system using the provided .deb package. Sun's Java Virtual Machine (at version 1.5 or higher) was a required dependency.

Running the code the first time brought up a series of first-run screens, then the main control panel. There were some indications that the software is still a little young. The help menu pulldown just listed the Ctrl+Shift+H command that had to be typed in manually to get the appropriate browser screen to display. Adding information to the transaction windows was a bit rough at first, several of the form's fields had no title and attempts to enter data were initially rejected with somewhat cryptic messages. Referring to the online tutorial document cleared up most of the confusion. Once some data was entered, creating reports and graphs became fairly intuitive.

Stable version 2.6 of Buddi was recently announced: "This includes numerous minor UI enhancements, which should make life a little easier for everyone. Note that the API has been upgraded to 2.6; this means that the old plugins will not work for you anymore. I have released all stable plugins in the Buddi Plugins repository for 2.6 format".

Financial software is often cited as an application space that is lacking for Linux, Buddi should help to fill that vacancy. The software is already useful enough for basic finance tracking, hopefully as the code matures, it will become a bit easier to use.

Buddi downloads are available in .jar format for all platforms, and as packages for Debian/Ubuntu systems. Give it a try.

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