On May 18, 2002 07:42 pm, Mel Seder wrote:
I've been using Quicken since the late 80's or early 90's. It does everything I need to do including getting prices for Canadian mutual funds.
I've used GnuCash (http://www.gnucash.org) for household finances for a few years. I'm using the most recent stable version, 1.6.6, compiled for Red Hat 7.2 from the source RPM. It's based on double-entry bookkeeping principles, so terminology and operation may be more strict than you are used to from Quicken. You set up accounts, and every transaction moves money from source accounts to destination accounts: "salary" to "bank", "bank" to "MUUG fees"... As a chequebook balancer, it's overkill. You can set up accounts for stocks and mutual funds. GnuCash can retrieve prices for stocks, through an interface to Perl's Finance::Quote module, but the interface is inflexible. I tried to retrieve Canadian mutual fund prices, and failed. Currency conversion is awkward in the stable version: every conversion has to move through a currency conversion account. I've avoided it so far. The only import format supported is QIF, which is hit-or-miss because of the incredible inventiveness that financial institutions have shown when generating screwed-up QIF. The first import will probably set things up so that the second import will go smoothly. The unstable 1.7.x series features support for storing data in Postgres databases, in addition to the current XML format.