Projects on the Move

This time, it’s personal. My current system of logging into my bank account to see whether my magical debit card still works isn’t working for me, so I’ve decided to test drive some open source finance managers: Grisbi, GnuCash, and HomeBank.

First released in French in 2000, the Grisbi accounting program is now available in several languages and runs on most operating systems. To download Grisbi, visit the project’s SourceForge page [1] or homepage [2]. The install and configuration is intuitive – select your country and currency, the list of "categories" you’ll use (either a standard category set or an empty list with no categories defined yet), add bank details, and then create a new account from scratch or import data from an online bank account or accounting software. I opted to create a new bank account. Other options include a cash account, liabilities account, or assets account (Figure 1).