In the next article we are going to take a look at GnuCash. A colleague told us about this program in a article posted on this blog. GnuCash 3.0 was released a few weeks ago, which is the last published version of this personal finance system free software. This is software that is officially part of the GNU Project and has cross-platform support.
The program will provide us with accounting functions suitable for small businesses and individuals. We will be able to keep track of finances on multiple accounts. There is support for customer, vendor, and employee processing. It has an X-based graphical user interface, double entry, an account hierarchy, expense accounts (categories). You can also import Quicken QIF and OFX files.
This tool is designed to be easy to use, yet powerful and flexible. GnuCash will allow us to track bank accounts, stocks, income and expenses. The program can be as fast and intuitive as a checkbook register. It's based on professional accounting principles to provide accurate and useful reports.
For those who are a little lost, Wikipedia tells us that GnuCash is a double entry free software personal finance system. In the beginning it was more focused on being a management tool for personal finances. In its latest versions it has tried to offer something closer to a management solution for SMEs without abandoning your initial goal.
GnuCash 3.0 General Features
As I have written lines above, the latest version of this program is GnuCash 3.0. This offers some differences compared to previous versions. It must be said that the highlight is that now uses the GTK 3.0 toolkit and the WebKit2Gtk API. This change was forced because some of the major Gnu / Linux distributions have dropped support for the WebKit1 API.
In addition to the technological migration, GnuCash 3.0 includes other new features that can be used by users to better function with the program. Among them we will have the possibility of using new editors to delete data obsolete or incorrect. We will have access to a new user interface for manage files associated with transactions. We will also have at our disposal an improved structure for remove old prices from the database and a new way of remove files from the history list in the file menu. Another new feature that we can use are the new report types and a new CSV importer rewritten in C ++.
As generalities of GnuCash we will say that it is a personal financial accounting software and for small companies. It comes to us with a free license under the GNU GPL. It is available for GNU / Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, and Windows.
These are just some of the features of this new version. The list of all new features and changes incorporated into GnuCash 3.0 It is quite long and you can see all of them in the official announcement of the new version.
GnuCash installation
GnuCash 3.0 can be downloaded from the official website if we use Mac or Windows. While in GNU / Linux we will have to compile the code that we download from that website.
If we don't want to have to fight with the source code, we can also search repositories of the distribution that we are using. Another possibility is the option of installation from software utility from Ubuntu, in it we will also find this program. Although it must be clarified that in these two ways possibly we will not be able to obtain the latest version at the moment. For this article I have tried to install the program from the Ubuntu software utility. The installed version is 2.6.12.
In case we need help with the operation of the program, we can turn to the help manual that the creators of this program make available to users on the project website. We can also consult the source code of this program in its corresponding GitHub page.