HomeBank, Grisbi & Gnucash

Puppy related raves and general interest that doesn't fit anywhere else
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GeoffS
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HomeBank, Grisbi & Gnucash

#1 Post by GeoffS »

Barry has announced that HomeBank will be part of the next version of Puppy.
As gnucash has 'died' as an option - see http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=19602 and
as it is the start of a new financial year and a new bookkeeping program is urgently needed. Is there any chance of someone producing a .pet of HomeBank? PLEASE :lol:
Quicken 'works' under wine however its complex windowing seems to defeat wine and some very confusing behavour occurs.
The only program that really works well is QuickBooks under wine however as a private bookkeeping program it is not really suitable.
KMyMoney works however it is not very good and its reporting is limited and of course it requires KDE.
I'm sure Barry would like to know that somebody is out there testing HomeBank :lol:
Cheers
Geoff
Last edited by GeoffS on Tue 10 Jul 2007, 10:48, edited 1 time in total.

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BarryK
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#2 Post by BarryK »

Yes, test away!
I've uploaded the PET package to the usual place:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dis ... ackages-2/

Note, it's small, the PET package is 182K, a good choice for Puppy, as long as it works okay. But, the developer says it's very mature as was used for many years on Amiga, it's just the GTK2 port part of it that is new.

GeoffS
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#3 Post by GeoffS »

Barry
Thank you very much, I'll keep you posted.
It does seem mature, their updates etc seem to be about enhancements or quite minor bugs - here's hoping.
Thanks again
Geoff

GeoffS
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#4 Post by GeoffS »

Barry
Well, I've had a bit of look at it.
1. It could do with an English speaker doing some of the translation from French :lol:
2. I began to suspect that this was not going to be satisfactory when as I entered the opening balances it didn't ask for class of account (asset, liability etc) and then didn't ask for the opening balance date. When I finished that I then found it could not produce a Balance Sheet nor had it calculated an Equity balance so I had no way of being able to easily check my entries.
3. This the important one - It has an almost total lack of reporting. Maybe this is a paper saving feature, however you can't even get reports on the screen. All you can get is a list of all your accounts and their balances and a list of expense and income totals. Note:- totals only, you cannot find the individual transactions that make up the total. If you find you have a 'strange' expense (or income) total you would have to manually search through all the transactions in all the accounts to hopefully find the error. This lack alone would make me reject the use of this program. There is no suggestion that the reporting will be improved in future releases.
4. There is no EXPORT facility so you can't develop your own reporting, nor can you move your data to another program.
5. The car expense feature is nice but certainly does not make up for the lack of reporting.
6. Poor internal linkage. e.g. Having defined a 'category' as an expense when posting an amount to it you still have to 'toggle' it as negative.

I would certainly NOT recommend this program.
Sorry Barrie - I really can't find anything really positive to say about it. I suppose it is better than XFinans but not by much.
I would recommend people to install KDE and use KMyMoney or get gnucash Version2 going.
Cheers
Geoff

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BarryK
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#5 Post by BarryK »

Okay, how about Grisbi? It is quite mature and has lots of features, is also small. What has prevented me from putting it in Puppy is needs Latex to print -- but I guess that could be a PET pkg.
There is also Ian's PuppyMoney.
Both of these are PET pckages, but I don't have the ltest Grisbi -- well, I'll go grab the source right now, and will upload a PET.

http://www.grisbi.org/

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BarryK
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#6 Post by BarryK »

Okay, Grisbi v0.5.9 is now at ibiblio:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dis ... ackages-2/

GeoffS
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#7 Post by GeoffS »

Barry
I had a look at Grisbi some time ago. There is a statement on their web page which concerns me. I paraphrase but essentially it says 'the program is not suitable for associations that require double entry bookkeeping' thereby admitting that it does not use double entry.
How or why anybody would create a bookkeeping program that doesn't use double entry I can not imagine. It is just so easy to do. Without it recovery from any sort of program failure is almost impossible. With it almost anything is possible! New features can be added at will and reporting 'is a soda'. Likewise the handling of the user editing transactions.
Despite that tirade :D I'll have another look at it tomorrow.
Cheers
Geoff

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Béèm
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#8 Post by Béèm »

I tried Grisbi in Windows for a start.
I had crashes, which I have addressed to the NNTP support group.
Apart from that, it is the first Bank program I encountered that supports import of .ofx and I could import transactions, the bank account was created automatically in this process, but the crash came when trying to save the account.

In the NNTP support group I addressed also the lack of ghost script printing.

Well I least for the Windows version I am sure, report output can be directed to a browser and then printed.
Time savers:
Find packages in a snap and install using Puppy Package Manager (Menu).
[url=http://puppylinux.org/wikka/HomePage]Consult Wikka[/url]
Use peppyy's [url=http://wellminded.com/puppy/pupsearch.html]puppysearch[/url]

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#9 Post by GeoffS »

OK, cold morning and I've had time to play :lol:
Grisbi is a big advance on HomeBank
Like Homebank, some English documentation would help.
Like Gnucash, it is not very intuitive.
I have not managed to crash it.
I imported all of last year's transactions (approx 2500) from Gnucash. It sort of did it and did almost get the correct answers. Did require some massaging to get it correct but nothing too bad.
It is single entry bookkeeping which means that it has no way of checking that the data is all correct and that it balances. Unlike Gnucash.
Reporting is OK however setting up your own reports has an incredible number of options and it took me quite a while before I managed to get non-zero totals. It is not very confidence building to see a long column of figures (all debits or all credits) produce a total of zero :?
I believe that the reporting options are quite simply 'over the top' and would be a considerable impediment to many users.
I'm still getting euro signs on some totals.
It does not know of our convention of placing the currency sign before the figures.
Being French it does get the dates correct :D
Data entry or transaction entry is OK but appears to have more fields available than most users would want. That may be fixable.
You can not produce a balance sheet other than at today's date and then only on the screen.
I've had no success with printing. Mozilla could not understand the HTML file produced. Printing to a postscript file required Latex.
I will persevere with Grisbi. It does appear to be useable even if the basic design (single entry) is flawed.
Cheers
Geoff

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#10 Post by BarryK »

GeoffS, this is good feedback to forward to the Grisbi developers!

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HomeBank, Grisbi and Gnucash

#11 Post by GeoffS »

I have to partially withdraw some of my previous comments about Grisbi.
The import from Gnucash might not have crashed but it made some very strange mistakes. Some of the account totals are wrong but by only quite small amounts although one is incorrect by a very large amount.
Entry of transactions is OK up to the point where you want to enter a 'split' transaction then it becomes very clumsy. You have to click on a category called 'Breakdown' which then causes a 'Breakdown' button on the current data entry form to become active. You then click on that button and an entirely new data entry window appears (completely hiding the previous one) into which you enter the lines of the split transaction. The entire 'split' transaction handling appears to have been cobbled in.
The screen handling is quite old-fashioned with all windows appearing full screen within the main program window. You can't grab the current window and move it aside while looking for something underneath.
It compares quite unfavourably with Gnucash, except that Gnucash doesn't work :( .
Noted your comment above Barry however I'll persevere a little longer before I send anything to them. I think my patience will run out eventually -
Geoff

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#12 Post by BarryK »

Geoff, have you tried PuppyMoney?

GeoffS
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#13 Post by GeoffS »

Barry
Yes, I did look at PuppyMoney. I'm afraid I found it far too simplistic.
So many of these programs have started life with somebody who has kept some records using a spreadsheet or maybe if they are a bit older in a 13 column cash book and it shows. :cry:

Regarding Grisbi:-
The import from Gnucash was far worse than I suspected.
As I mentioned in my previous post the final balance of each account is almost correct but in some cases half the transactions are missing. The accounts have an opening balance (which should be zero) which appears to be the total of the missing transactions. :?
I will start the year again, without the import of last year from Gnucash.
Cheers
Geoff

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#14 Post by GeoffS »

Can't resist a puzzle :lol:
The missing transactions were easy - there is a tiny button which controls whether reconciled transactions are displayed. Found :)
However, the balance was still incorrect.
Went through an account and found a truly missing transaction. It involved a 'split' part of which went to an asset account and part to an expense account (category). Grisbi didn't know what to do with this, didn't bother to ask and didn't post a warning. :cry:
Geoff

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#15 Post by GeoffS »

Ahhhhhggg!! :cry: It gets worse. Some similar transactions were 'half' entered. Half the transaction was entered (without complaint) and left unbalanced.
I would NOT recommend anybody using the Gnucash import facility unless they are prepared to do a lot of cleaning up.
Geoff
Next day -
I've finally cleaned up the Gnucash import. Lots of strange errors. It depended to some degree on which account included in the transaction was encountered first. It certainly could not handle splits which involved asset or liability accounts and categories (expense or income accounts).
I will now attempt to 'use' Grisbi for a while.

There is still the problem of printing, it needs Latex.

Grisbi crashed when I tried to change the font from the tiny one used to something a little bigger.
:(
Geoff

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#16 Post by jparkdo »

Geoff,

I too have been looking for some time for a suitable open source replacement for Quicken. I do have one that looks pretty good from a couple of years ago called NFP Accounting by John H. Harris. His website project page is called http://www.unencumbereddesign.com/proj.htm , but he took the link to NFP accounting down (why?). He released it as a Windows executable, but it's just a Tcl startkit. It's programmed in Tcl/Tk and uses SQlite as the database. He designed it to do double ledger accounting well, and he details how you can use a dummy account to check it for accuracy. He also made a pretty nice PDF documentary guide for it, which I also have. It works well with the Puppy Linux Wine 0.9.29 package for me. It's just that I'm not as far as into double ledger accounting as you to really test it. Anyway, if you are interested I could upload the documentation and the executable to you somewhere. I'm kind of curious to see what you think of it. The only thing I got to crash on it was the import feature, but it has the usual transaction reports, P&L report, and so on an does export various parts of the database in TAB and TDB formats. It also prints to a Windows printer. Even though the import feature crashes, there are various QIF to CSV import programs available, and one could use a straight up SQlite database browser tool such as TkSQlite (which works really well in my experience) to import data into the database.

Jerry
jwp

GeoffS
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#17 Post by GeoffS »

Jerry
Thanks for the info.
I've persevered with Grisbi but have given up. It's reporting system while having far too many options, provided far too few reports :? I would hate to try to prepare an Australian tax return from it which is all I really do this for.
For now, and probably for the future, I'm using QuickBooks under Wine. Not perfect for private bookkeeping but actually works quite well and I'm familiar with it, I've been using it for years and still use it for commercial use.
I do trust Wine - it even runs the Australian Tax Office electronic tax preparation system. :D
With QuickBooks I've worked on the same data files with Windows and Linux/Wine and never had a problem.
Thanks for the offer but at the moment I don't want to test another program, particularly one that appears to be no longer supported. Maybe the owner found that support of something like this was just far too much work :(
Thanks again
Geoff

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#18 Post by BarryK »

I'm thinking that I'll take Pup 2.17.1 back to HomeBank -- it may have limited features, but at least you know what you're getting. Grisbi seems to be full of nasty surprises.

TonshA
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#19 Post by TonshA »

Hello

Even though I don't personally use an accounting package, I found this thread quite interesting. So I did a search of various accounting packagaes available on linux/unix. The following is a selection of links I found:

http://jalia.sourceforge.net/
http://eqonomize.sourceforge.net/index.html
http://tnemeth.free.fr/projets/gAcc-en.html
http://gnofin.sourceforge.net/
http://www.abisource.com/~msevior/
http://www.arachnoid.com/PLCash/index.html
http://www.eekboek.nl/
http://www.honeycalc.com/phpwcms/index. ... ,0,0,1,0,0
http://buddi.sourceforge.net/en/
http://jgnash.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
http://www.freehackers.org/Opale/
http://tony.maro.net/ossramblings/cbt.php

Quite a few of these websites are not in english - which is a shame (especially for eekboek which looks rather powerful).

Equonomize looks fairly comprehensive, and claims to be double-entry as well, but it is based on QT so I've no idea how big it would be. Buddi looks interesting for personal accounting too.

Hey! Maybe someone could put together an Accounting SFS! (I've no idea where to start with something like that, I'm afraid... :( )

My own personal tastes run to personal/family budgetting, and I found a very intersting (commercial) package called YNAB:

http://www.youneedabudget.com/

The original product is an excel spreadsheet, although now Jesse is selling a Windows app, and is now looking at developing a web-based version.

Anyway, there was enough information on the product for me to produce a Gnumeric spreadsheet to do the same job, which I am currently testing on my own finances (and that was fun, 'cos i've never really got into spreadsheets before).

I may make it available one day.

The only other thing I found, which I thought was pretty cool, was TinyBooks:

http://www.winograd.com/ftinybooks.html

A Mac-only product unfortunately, but the website does give a lot of indication on how the app is SUPPOSED to work, and it does look very simple. If any of our fantastic developers wanted to create PUPPYBooks, this might be a good starting point (but make it double-entry please! :wink: )

DaveA

TonshA
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#20 Post by TonshA »


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