[ale] Personal Finance Software

James P. Kinney III jkinney at localnetsolutions.com
Tue Apr 12 23:27:37 EDT 2005


On Tue, 2005-04-12 at 22:09 -0400, Barry Hawkins wrote:
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> James P. Kinney III wrote:
> > Just finished the final migration from Quicken to gnucash. So far, wife
> > likes it much better as she no longer needs to load up vmware.
> [...]
> James, didn't you mention using sql-ledger for your stuff as well when
> you gave that great SMB presentation?  Was that just business stuff, or
> would you say folks could use that for personal finance as well?

Sql-Ledger can also be used for personal stuff. It is much more business
oriented than is GnuCash. GnuCash is much more like Quicken (NOT
Quickbooks). Since it only runs on a single machine (OK. It can use an
NFS shared file storage but not multi-access. The Postgresql backend was
not complete enough the last time I was testing it) it is not suitable
for a business where more than 1 person needs to hit the books.

There are a few people on the Sql-Ledger mailing list using it for
personal finance as well. Most of these also have a business so adding
another "company" is no big deal for handling the personal finances.

GnuCash has something that SQL-ledger does not: the ability to import
Quicken files. (Then import from gnucash to sql-ledger... ;). SQL-Ledger
can import lots of data from Quickbooks. The last version of Quicken I
used was from '99 (we _refused_ to do the 2000 upgrade once we found out
about the data exchange process with Intuit) and it's exporting of
reports and data was horrid. Not much more than print to a file with a
really ugly format that can't be slurped readily into a spreadsheet.
Gnucash took nearly 45 minutes on a fast AMD w/0.5GB RAM to import the
quicken file. It still took some manual tweaking but gnucash prompted
for input with some reasonable suggestions.

So to answer the question "Can SQL-Ledger be used for personal
finance?". I would say "yes, with reservations". If the personal finance
was a subset of a larger business operation, using the same tools for
both would be an advantage. Otherwise, gnucash or MoneyDance is much
simpler (for the most part) and "feels" more like a personal finance
program.
-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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