LWN: Comments on "The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)"

The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)

cdurst — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 21:25:49 +0000

If/when you decide to revisit this topic, please also include TurboCASH (http://www.turbocash-usa.com). It has been Open Source (GPL) since 2003 and from their website seems to be competitive with GNUCash.

More importantly, it also runs on Windows, so it may be useful as a Firefox-like bridge program to help ween users off of MSFT.

Balancing my check account

zblaxell — Sat, 24 Sep 2005 06:21:55 +0000

I've had about a 5% failure rate cashing pay checks. My bank is always ready to interpret "09/24/05" as "May 9, 1924" (despite the fact that the cheque has clearly labelled year, month, and day fields under the date area), resulting in the bank's refusal to honor the check. Handwritten checks have an even higher failure rate. In one case my check was stolen from the armored car servicing the ATM.

To date I have received every electronic payment on time, even in cases were major technical problems with the payment systems (either on my employer's end or at the bank) would seem likely to interfere. Hundreds of payments with no errors...just what I'd expect from properly maintained and supervised information systems.

These days I can barely avoid chuckling when I hand over an arbitrary piece of paper with no authentication beyond a signature to a bank teller...how could such a lame protocol actually work? Well, with a failure rate in the low double digits and an ongoing fraud/anti-fraud arms race, clearly, it *doesn't* work.

In the worst case, all one has to do is get the bank and the creditor/vendor on a conference call, read out the transaction confirmation number from your statement or electronic payment, then sit back and listen while they argue about where the money went.

So far it works every time. Usually what happens is that the creditor/vendor finally admits that their payment data is imported through a human data entry clerk, a fax machine, highly buggy third-party software, or by reading transaction details over the phone...or some combination of these. Maybe someone has typed in the wrong account numbers or the wrong amounts. Some companies have a 3-6 month (!) lag between accounts receivable and accounts billable. Sometimes, when the creditor/vendor finally figures out where your money went, you get to hear a meaty slapping, tearing, or rustling sound over the phone, as if someone is slapping their forehead or pulling out their hair.

Balancing my check account

zblaxell — Sat, 24 Sep 2005 05:51:46 +0000

That could never happen to me, because no production cell phone on the market anywhere on the planet has 153 megabytes of free RAM to blow on my bank's Javascript login page, or the precise set of CSS and DOM bugs that Netscape 4.74 has.

(OK, the offending bank did actually fix their web site a year or two ago. But at the time the customer support people were quite belligerent about any failure of their site to work with any particular browser being my problem.)

This is one thing I haven't been able to figure out. I've used no less than five financial institutions over the years, and only one of them was accessible with w3m...until they "upgraded" their web site a year or two ago. There is no reason to use Javascript on a bank web page--the transactions and dialogs are more or less exactly what HTML forms were designed to do. I've seen bank sites that theoretically would work properly without Javascript and use no features not present in HTML forms from the RFC1860's, *except* that there is an explicit Javascript check on the back end.

Banking with w3m, while it lasted, was nice: I'm logged in and out and finished a bill payment in under 30 seconds, which is about the login page loading time of the Javascript banks...

The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)

rqosa — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 07:03:50 +0000

If I remember correctly, the version of Sylpheed that was in Debian Woody would write things to the terminal.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)

cbraxton — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 14:05:40 +0000

> At least I haven't met anybody in my life that doesn't have a bank account.

Well, I don't have a bank account, and know quite a few others who don't. Here in the U.S. it's not terribly unusual -- in fact most cities of any size have check cashing shops that cater to individuals without bank accounts. (They will cash checks, sell inexpensive money orders, accept payments for utilities, etc.)

Balancing my check account

sphealey — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 13:50:28 +0000

>> I do want a paper trail for most transactions, for
>> reasons similar to why I want a paper trail for electronic
>> election machines

> I think you don't need checks for this. Even though my
> salary goes directly to my bank account, I get a quite
> detailed paper about this (which also includes the money
> that didn't get to my account, e.g. taxes).

Consumer fraud / consumer protection laws are extremely weak in the United States, and in any dispute those laws greatly favor the entity with the most money and most political power. Which 99.99999% of the time is not the consumer.

Should you as a consumer end up in a dispute with a creditor or vendor of any type (particularly a financial institution), your _only_ hope is to have actual paper records of everything and to have sent every transaction via US Mail. As soon as you start bringing forth phone calls, e-mails, and electronic transactions as evidence the presumption of liability shifts to you and you lose. Guaranteed.

So while their is an element of conservatism in the continued use of checks/cheques, for those who are concerned about such things there is an element of self-preservation as well.

sPh

The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)

joib — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 10:29:52 +0000

There's also jgnash, which is decent if cross-platform compatibility is an issue.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)

Felix.Braun — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 14:38:03 +0000

How do the various 'checkless' systems in the world deal with persons who don't have a bank account ?

I guess the short answer would be that this doesn't occur.

At least I haven't met anybody in my life that doesn't have a bank account. Here in Germany Bank accounts are free for students and not exactly expensive for the rest of the population (the reason for this, I belive, is that we have a strong market penetration of state run Banks "Sparkassen", one thing that the private sector banks don't stop complaining about.)

And what about micro-businesses who don't have the capability to accept a bankcard [debit or credit] ?

Money transfers work between any two bank accounts. There is no need for any bankcard to be involved. If you purchase something, the seller writes an invoice, you transfer the money to her account either before or after you get the merchandise. It's as simple as that. But then, maybe I'm missing the point of the question?

The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)

dvdeug — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 12:16:15 +0000

Why are currencies so much of a pain in all these programs? Unix locales include the currency, so there's always a good default available. If you really wanted to be fancy, you could make a list of two or three currencies of world-wide importance (Euro, US Dollar) and the currencies of the countries around the country of the user.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)

jstAusr — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 18:40:14 +0000

The license states "only for your own personal use", using it to write a review probably is not only for Grumpy Editor's personal use.

Also, I worry about lock-in on programs like that and have no interest in them. Oh, sorry folks we've sold out to the monopoly I'm sure they will meet your future needs.

Strange 19th century banking

giraffedata — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 23:48:39 +0000

The idea of handing someone a piece of paper, which they then hand to their bank, and their bank sends to my bank, seems extremely quaint.

Actually, there is normally at least one other stop between the banks, and often several.

But starting one year ago, the transfer is hardly ever paper. The paper check gets put into a computer and shredded as it enters the system, and makes the rest of the journey as an electronic record. But in some cases, it actually gets printed out and becomes paper again, because some smaller banks don't have the electronic check technology. The complexity of such a system (think about all the safeguards necessary to make sure a check doesn't accidentally become two checks as it changes form) made it take years for the US banking system to take even this step.

Just another example of an extremely poor quality business that people accept because it never occurred to them that they should not have to accept it. :(

I'm not sure who you think is accepting what poor quality. There are people who demand to be paid with a physical instrument and others who demand to pay with a physical instrument. Banks aren't forcing anyone to accept anything -- they all handle checkless transactions for people who want them. Virtually no businesses force customers to pay by check, because there are banking services that will convert a customer's electronic payment into a paper check where the business does demand one, and businesses that take a check but not plastic at point of sale are extremely rare.

I suspect countries which have managed to eliminate checks already have done it through the use of central management of the banking system, which is lacking in the US. And it's lacking not because the folks in charge of it are too stupid to see its advantages, but because deep cultural values in the US say government should be local -- the banking rules are made primarily by individual state governments, private banking associations, and invidivual banks.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)

jstAusr — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 15:27:32 +0000

Ah, a religious person complaining about religious people. Sounds about par.

Balancing my check account

mightyduck — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 14:55:39 +0000

Well, compared to Europe the US is still a third world country in terms
of cell phone usage and coverage ;-). But it's catching up.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)

guybar — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 08:19:14 +0000

and our Grumpy Editor did say he was not going to look at commercial products

And with all due respect (which I have), he might have been wrong: at least as far as giving an example for what the standard in the non-free world is.
I have been curious about this for some time.

If you want to look at it, you can download a copy to play with.

Isn't the purpose of a "review" to do exactly this kind of "playing with" the products in the field, thus saving a lot of redundant work by a lot of readers ?

Balancing my check account

man_ls — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 06:29:54 +0000

The Netherlands is flat as a pancake, I find it difficult to believe there are areas there without coverage apart from lifts and the Tube. Here in Spain you can maybe climb a high mountain and get lost, but most cities and villages are covered.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)

4bruck — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 04:54:04 +0000

So, I'll ask [because I don't seem to quite understand]....

How do the various 'checkless' systems in the world deal with persons who don't have a bank account ?

And what about micro-businesses who don't have the capability to accept a bankcard [debit or credit] ?

Strange 19th century banking

lothar — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 23:26:18 +0000

You'r talking to my heart ;-) I moved to the US about two years ago (from
Germany) and it was hard to believe what I saw. Sadly it's rality. :-)

The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)

wolfgang.oertl — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 22:53:22 +0000

After looking through a host of financial programs I settled with ledger, a command line tool that reads a file full of transactions (it uses the double entry system) and performs various tasks like showing the current balance. Very quick, my data is readable with any editor, as cross platform as it gets, almost no dependencies, small footprint and free. It's not the right tool for everybody, but maybe have a look: http://www.newartisans.com/ledger.html, or http://sourceforge.net/projects/ledger/

Checks (paper form)

goeran — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 22:03:21 +0000

> Why do the Americans still use cheques for salaries?

Why do they use inches and feet? Farenheit temperatures? Paper format called "letter" rather than A4?

:-)

Strange 19th century banking

mightyduck — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 19:09:49 +0000

I moved from Germany to the US and the banking system was a big
(negative) surprise to me. It's sooo 19th century. But it's not the only
outdated and poor thing Americans put up with. Another one are appliances
(from washing machines to microwave ovens...). Don't get me started on
that one.

Balancing my check account

mightyduck — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 19:03:12 +0000

What do you do if you don't have coverage? (Yes, areas like that exist,
for instance here on Long Island) You can't do online banking then?

I definitely prefer the German PIN/TAN method.

Strange 19th century banking

rogerd — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 17:50:14 +0000

Check Kiting, yeah, that is what it's called.

Even our US system calls that fraud, and will prosecute people for it.

I think the last Banking bill here made it allowable to post an electronic copy of a check as if it were physically received, thereby reducing the "check's in the mail" timeframe down to the speed of light transit.

Strange 19th century banking

macc — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 17:38:17 +0000

In Germany you pay by check if you are short on money.

i.e. when a bill is due you send the check on the day its due.
This is usually deemed sufficient for meeting the due-date.

But snailmail takes 2 Days and the recipient has to carry it
to his bank and get it booked(1-2Days). After another 2-4 Days
the amount is debited to your bank account.

This gives you about a week of credit
which some businesses and private persons
desperately need.

Balancing my check account

NAR — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 17:18:09 +0000

3) You access your account on the internet using your password.

4) When you make a bank transfer you use one of the numbers on your list. You scratch that number and use another one for the next transaction.

My bank simply sends a text message to my mobile phone after the username/password login with a secondary one-time password. This is needed not only to finish the login, but for starting transactions, modifying card limits, etc.

Bye,NAR

The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)

dayers — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 13:08:43 +0000

Aaaw, come on! This isn't a religious issue, for all love. Since Moneydance is way ahead on features and useablity, why not give it a look? I'd rather see it the standard for comparison than Quicken.

I used gnucash for a while, but md is much, much better, IMO.

Balancing my check account

fjf33 — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 12:56:43 +0000

That is what I do too, but here in the US we would call that balancing the checkbook. I think is more differences in language than anything else. However, I still do have a checkbook which I hardly use. There are a couple of die hards that cannot handle an electronic payment. For example I had to start paying the building maintenance with a paper check because the management company was sending me notices for non-payment, and it was a pain to make them understand what was going on. The reason is that they are a small office that hardly has a computer so they are WAYYYY behind the times. Another one is my mortgage. If I want to pay extra principal I have to do it with a check so that I can send the for and let them know exactly how to break up the extra money. If not, they will apply it to where it is better for them (to the next payment probably). Everything else is electronic.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)

fatrat — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 09:09:51 +0000

It's a commercial non-open source program and our Grumpy Editor did say he was not going to look at commercial products. If you want to look at it, you can download a copy to play with.

Balancing my check account

ekj — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 07:19:02 +0000

Sure. But thats not the entire (or even the main) point of using an application like Gnucash.

The point is, to be able to make wise decisions about your finances, the first needed step is to *know* what your finances actually are. This doesn't mean only how much money you have, and how much you spent, but also what you spent it on.

Using Gnucash I can easily and quickly answer questions like:

How much did I spend in total for having a car this year, included deprecation, insurance, repairs, petrol etc ?
How much did that vacation in Cypern back 2 years ago actually cost ?
How have my stock, on average developed this year ?
Where did all the money actually go ?
Do we tend to have higher expenses in certain months ? If so, how much higher ?

Sure, you can answer all of those without a personal finance program, but it gets complicated and tedious. Especially when you, for example, own stock on an exchange where courses are given in norwegian-krone, pay fees associated with that to a brokerage wanting british-pound, live in and have most of your transactions in Euros.

Strange 19th century banking

shane — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 22:20:13 +0000

I moved to the Netherlands from the US a few years ago, and from my lazy, computer-oriented view the banking system here is so much better than in the US it almost makes me weap.

The idea of handing someone a piece of paper, which they then hand to their bank, and their bank sends to my bank, seems extremely quaint.

Just another example of an extremely poor quality business that people accept because it never occurred to them that they should not have to accept it. :(

The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)

tzafrir — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 21:25:51 +0000

At least in Debian its output is thus redirected to /dev/null

The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)

sjj — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 19:50:35 +0000

Thanks for the pointer to Moneydance. Grumpy editor, would you include it in your review?

Balancing my check account

smoogen — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 19:02:09 +0000

The real idea about balancing a check account is really to keep a budget. This is something that doesnt seem to be taught or 'learned' by people these days as can be seen by the fact that people seem to just keep using the ATM card until it says 'no more money'.

Balancing my check account

oak — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 18:47:35 +0000

> using a check gives me immediate control of what is going on with my
> account without depending on the bank. Balancing a checkbook is a check
> to see that I've managed my money properly, but it is also a check to
> see if the bank is doing its job properly.

At least here in Finland you get receipt whenever you pay something (food,
gas whatever) with your bank card, or when you withdraw cash with it from
the ATM.

A couple of times a month, I'll enter the receipts from my wallet to
GnuCash. Next month when the bank sends the monthly summary of all
withdraws and deposits, I'll just check whether the balance matches what I
got in GnuCash at same date. If it doesn't, I'll just check whether each
entry I'd entered to GnuCash matches what's in the bank summary. So far,
it's always been an error I've made in entering the recipe to GnuCash
(knock wood ;-)).

Balancing my check account

jwb — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 17:25:07 +0000

The term "paycheck" is lodged deeply in the American English dialect, but it does no necessarily imply the use of paper. In fact every person in my firm, and most people I know, are paid using electronic transfer. I prefer check, because there are many terms in the direct deposit agreement that I cannot accept. For example, my company's direct deposit agreement allows them to take money from my account to cover various damages and expenses. I'm not willing to give anyone carte blanche to fool with my bank balance.

Of course I still use cash for most thing. Perhaps I'm terribly backwards.

Balancing my check account

carcassonne — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 16:41:10 +0000

"I remember seeing a check (yes, I've seen one person once using a check) in Finland when I was a really small boy."

In Germany many transactions are done using popular Ueberweisungen, either on paper or virtually at your bank's web site. They are simply bank transfers. They are free and you can transfer money to anyone having an account at AnyBank. Utilities sending bills also send a Ueberweisung, which is a bank transfer formular already filled with their information.

You buy something off e-bay ? You get the seller's name, account number and bank name and there you go. You log in at your bank's web site and fill out a virtual bank transfer formular. Direct from your bank to his/her bank, no middleman service like Paypal or whatever. And it's free.

And no giving out your credit card information.

Of interest (still no pun), the security aspect of using such virtual bank transfer. Here's how it works:

1) You go to your bank and you ask for a series of TAN (transaction) numbers.

2) You receive then personally a list, on paper, of 50 such numbers.

3) You access your account on the internet using your password.

4) When you make a bank transfer you use one of the numbers on your list. You scratch that number and use another one for the next transaction.

5) When you're about to run out of TAN numbers, you go back to the bank to get a new list.

6) If you loose your printed list (it happened to me once) then you have to tell a good story to the bank clerk. I'd say that if you loose it twice in a row it could be difficult to get a new one.

You cannot make a bank transfer from your account if you don't have a valid list of TAN numbers that were issued to you.

You can also give out your bank account number for companies to take money. Like when buying from Amazon.de for instance. Again, no credit card info needed, no interest fee (even small) to pay, no middleman service to pay.

So everything is paid by using these bank transfers in Germany. Rent, doctors, insurance, e-bay buyings, everything. Rest is by cash and ATM card.

Now, how come there's still no teletext feature on TVs in North America ? ;-))

The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)

rogerd — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 15:29:54 +0000

I Agree. I was running Moneydance long before GNUCash was popular.

I installed Moneydance in 199x sometime and used it ever since. Even upgraded once or twice. Laughed in the face of Y2K. The ability of running a Linux/Java app remotely on an wireless XP laptop is what keeps me using Linux for the long term.

Balancing my check account

NAR — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 15:08:22 +0000

I do want a paper trail for most transactions, for reasons similar to why I want a paper trail for electronic election machines

I think you don't need checks for this. Even though my salary goes directly to my bank account, I get a quite detailed paper about this (which also includes the money that didn't get to my account, e.g. taxes). My bills are atomatically payed from my account and I get a paper from the electricity company, from the gas company, etc. When I pay with the debit card, I get receipts, just like when I get cash from the ATM. And I also get a monthly summary from the bank about my accounts on paper.

Bye,NAR

The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)

nix — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 13:58:09 +0000

Also by compiling them with --disable-debug, which is *not* the default.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)

fatrat — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 13:31:46 +0000

Sadly, having gone through looking at KMyMoney and GnuCash last year, I ended up paying money for Moneydance. It's not only much, much nicer to use but being a Java app is cross platform.

Free software has a way to go in this area yet I feel. Even the best (GnuCash IMO) isn't nearly as good as the commercial stuff out there.

About cheques...

kleptog — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 13:19:41 +0000

Cheques are one of those things that varies a lot between countries. Australia has cheques but they're becoming rarer. The fees are crazy and they takes three days to clear. You want to wait three working days for your salary to be available? Most people choose for direct deposit, then it's available the next day. You're supposed to get a slip from your employer when you're paid though.

Here in the Netherlands they experimented with cheques but the fraud was so bad that they killed it fairly quickly. Here it works in reverse, the bill has a tear off section with the account number of the account to be paid to. You fill your account number and sign it and send it to *your* bank, no third party involvement. So it's more like payment authorisation.

I worked in a company in Australia that accepted cheques and they were the single most annoying method of payment. First the customer sends it to you. You have to copy by hand the details into the system to record the payment. Then you take all the cheques to the bank. Three days later you find out which cheques bounced due to insufficient funds. You then have to undo the payment in the system, add the bank fee to the account, contact the customer who then hopefully pays some other way. Ugh! Gimme electronic payment anyday.

If the customer doesn't have the money, why should I care? Why am I even involved in the process?

I wouldn't mind if cheques disappeared from the face of the earth.