Accounting

So when I got home tonight with a head exploding after an evening of hermenutics I found Jane busy with a budget in OpenOffice.org.

Again our SunRays show the advantage of moving away from Windows. We have had PC's in the house with MS Office and in recent years OpenOffice.org on them. In that time Jane has never created a spreadsheet. When I got home tonight she already had a good start on where she wanted to go.

Ok so there were some simple tricks I was able to show her to get the layout and formulas working as she wanted. Took about 30 mins.

During that time she mentioned that since I have sorted out the sound on the SunRays (we now have a shared music folder where all our CD's are being held in MP3 format) none of the kids have used the Dell PC that is in Andrews bedroom. They have watched a couple of movies on the PS2 using the SunRay monitor. Andrew plugs headphones into the SunRay and then uses the screen to play games on the PS2. Stephen has been sending people his first emails. Both Andrew and Peter have used them for their homework.

To stop all need for the PC I need to sort out photos and the camera connections (one option if the USB for SunRays is too hard might be something like this LinkSys thingy). I also need to sort out writing CD's and connect the scanner. One easy solution for some of these things is to use the PC's running linux and writing to the SunRay Server disks, but it would be nice to see how much can be done on the SunRays and Server directly.

Anyway, to the point of this post, I promised Jane that I would have a look at installing some accounting software for her to try (we have used Quick Books in the past). A quick look on freshmeat raised lots of possibilities, so did a seach on the packages directly available. In the end I chose GnuCash. It is not installed as multi-user (need the postgresql version for that and at least some comments indicate that might not be quite ready, certainly not so obviously packages), but the data is in a shared location where Jane and I can both access it. 10 minutes later and we have a simple and powerful home accounts package installed for Jane and I only.

Yet again Linux wins out for a simple, immediate and cheap install of software that is not locking us into any company or upgrade cycle. Oh and of course the kids can't get to the data but we both can from any machine using our Smartcards. Also with Ubuntu being Debian based I can uninstall software just as easily without side effects or the accumulated cruft that you get on Windows.

I may look at some of the Web based systems later as I think we are close to it being practical to use our phones to enter expenses information. As all the systems I can see seem to support QWIF format for import and export we should be able to switch later. But possibly even better would be to add just expenses to GnuCash via the web, I don't need the whole accounting system, just the ability to record car miles and credit card expenses etc. Maybe I can just do a web page that will produce xml files for GnuCash to import which would be nicely secure.

Comments

[Nicholas Lee]

On linux for small business oriented account http://www.sql-ledger.org is the best. For home use, at the moment I think http://kmymoney.sf.net is probably the easiest to use with a decent feature set. Gnucash is really showing its age, the G2 port is taking a while.

[DaveW]

Nicholas, Thanks will look at these. Dave