![]() It’s much like Intuit Quicken in terms of its interface even the forest green opening splash screen is reminiscent of Quicken. KMyMoney is a free software program optionally included with KDE in some GNU/Linux distributions. I’d hate to see how long it takes with a year’s worth of bank and credit card transaction data in it. On a dual Opteron workstation with 4GB of RAM, it took about 15 seconds just to bring up a profit and loss calculation window after I selected it from the menu. One big negative point about jGnash is its speed: it’s extremely slow in its calculations, even with only a few simple entries of test data to work with. jGnash has six possible GUI “look and feel” sets, and about two dozen graphical themes, but I found the defaults to be the most attractive. Instead of a lot of fancy buttons, most of the functions in jGnash are executed through the menu system. The jGnash interface is minimalist, but still a cut above GnuCash’s barren interface. Export formats are inconsistent: you can export some reports to PDF, HTML, and comma-delimited text files (.CSV), but others offer only. Like Moneydance, the default file format jGnash saves in is XML-based, although it’s not the same file format Moneydance uses. As an added bonus, it can also import GnuCash data. Like all the programs I used for this article, jGnash can import from Quicken. jGnash is designed to work with a JRE version 1.4.0 and newer. I had no difficulty running the program on a 32-bit version 1.5.0 JRE, but on a different machine with a 64-bit version 1.5.0 JRE, jGnash froze when I tried to quit, forcing me to kill its process from the command line. Don’t expect any integration with GNOME or KDE, either - if you want jGnash in your menus, you will have to add it yourself. To run the program, you have to use the java -jar command from a terminal, which is about as user-unfriendly as a program binary can be. GPL-licensed jGnash is also written in Java, but doesn’t have a cool installer program like Moneydance has. My only real gripe about Moneydance is its lousy integration with GNU/Linux desktops when you install it it fails to generate any GNOME or KDE menu entries, so you’ll have to start it from the command line or navigate to the program binary through your graphical file manager. I didn’t have to read any manuals or help files to figure out how to use any portion of the program. The interface looks nice and is easy to navigate. Presumably this will be added to the default extension list when it is deemed production-ready. ![]() TXF format via a beta extension that you can, upon request, get from the Moneydance programmers. If you want to use Moneydance data with tax preparation software, you can export to the TurboTax. QIF or tab-delimited text files if you like. ![]() You can generate graphs and a wide variety of financial reports, and export them to. Moneydance saves its files in an XML-based format, which should be about as portable as a file format can be. I didn’t discover any other official extensions outside of the default list. The default extension list includes tools for importing text files, predicting future balances, an online updater for Moneydance, Yahoo! stock quotes and currency exchange rates, a Python scripting interface, and a credit card payoff calculator. QIF files, retrieve updated account information directly from bank Web sites that support the OFX protocol (there is a long list of participating banks, and if yours is not listed you can add yours via manual settings, or download data from your bank’s Web site and import it manually into Moneydance), and it has an extensibility architecture that allows you to add extra program components. I tested it on the 64-bit Sun JRE version 1.5.0 for Linux (a configuration that can be difficult for poorly written Java programs) and had no trouble installing or running it.ĭespite being proprietary, Moneydance seems to be superior to the other financial tools I tested. Moneydance is written in Java and therefore requires a Java Runtime Environment. The license is restrictive in all the usual ways - you can use Moneydance on only one computer, you can’t use it for commercial purposes, and you can’t modify it or give it out to anyone. Reilly Technologies’ Moneydance is the only proprietary program of the bunch. If you can adjust to a different interface, you might find you like one of them more than the better-known alternatives. GNU/Linux offers several similar applications - most of them free software - that can meet or exceed the capabilities of the proprietary programs. Intuit Quicken and Microsoft Money are two popular Windows-based packages for personal financial management.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |