I am just getting set up to use openSUSE. One of the first things I will want to set up is an accounting program to replace Microsoft Money.
I am retired and my needs are relatively simple - I need to keep up with an number of bank accounts, credit cards, income/expenses, and several investment accounts. I want a full fledged double entry accounting program but have no need for business features like payroll, receivables, etc.
It appears that KMyMoney will suit my needs just from reading the reviews. Has anyone had experience actually using it?
GnuCash is another possibility but I intend to use KDE. What do people think of it?
What other accounting packages are out there that I should consider?
You should try running gnucash (and any other GNOME program) under KDE anyway. I think you’ll find that it will it will run fine under KDE but some GNOME hooks might not be available. Sorry, no experience with gnucash, I just live hand to mouth.
Not unless you want to pay money. The top three in a recent comparison review in the UK LinuxFormat magazine are GnuCash, Moneydance (for which you pay) and KMyMoney - and the review of KMyMoney was of 0.8 and not the current 0.9 which puts right most of the criticisms in the review.
I don’t mind paying money for a superior product. When I find a free product that works well, I usually make a donation equivalent to what comparable software would cost. Every time I tried to get something for nothing, I got nothing for something plus a lot of frustration and wasted time. There really isn’t any such thing as a free lunch - somebody, somewhere pays.
From what I have read KMyMoney is probably where I will start.
I highly recommend KmyMoney2. I’ve been using it for a while now and I really like it. I have also used Gnucash in the past but I find KmyMoney to have a nicer user interface and the developers are quite active with it. If you want to try the latest development version, you can find installation directions on their website. Once you have all the dependencies, it’s not that difficult to install.
Gnucash is the only one I have tried that really uses double entry bookkeeping. KMyMoney is more like Microsoft Money - you have (e.g.) a bank account and the other side of any entry is a category and cannot be queried or edited in the same way you can in Gnucash.
BTW if you plan to use the OFX import function in Gnucash, you need to install libofx from Yast - for some reason, selecting Gnucash for download does not include this package, altough it does include libofx4. Try importing wthout libofx and your import screen will be blank.
