Thursday, June 23, 2005

Tech Progect of the Week

As I referenced earlier, I have (generally) weekly technology projects. They have recently included re-installing linux on my laptop, starting a blog, and a semi-remote ubuntu installation on a semi-networked computer system.

This week, I'm trying out some accounting software. Specifically, Grisbi.

Grisbi is a single-entry accounting system designed for home users to track their income and expenditures. It was originally written in France, and although it has been completely translated into most of the major languages, it retains it's euro-centric roots (i.e., default currency is the euro, support for multiple currencies simultaneously , each account can have a native currency, exchange rates are used to calculate account values in different currencies - it's kind of neat). It was initially written for linux, and released under the GPL as Open Source. It has been ported to Windows and, I think, Mac OS X.

I had tried out Grisbi under linux several weeks ago and found it to be rather... obtuse. I hadn't used a personal accounting program since Quicken for DOS several years ago. Yesterday, however, I ran across a newsforge article concerning Grisbi and it explained how the process worked. The brief tutorial was very helpful, and I was able to get started with it without much difficulty.

I'll be trying this out for a few months to see how well it works - I don't have much to compare it with, so it'll probably come up favorably. It supports transaction importing via MS Money export files, so I'm able to download transactions from my bank. I can see this working out very well for me.

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