Skrooge or kmymoney?

[The Liquidator]

Hi all

Up to now I've been using quicken standard 2002 to control my various bank and card accounts. It's served me well but it's getting on now and of course it's a windows app (which runs fine in wine btw)

I have looked at migrating for a little while now but have been put off by import issues. Firstly kmymoney won't import the QIF version Quicken 2002 produces - it's too old. Gnucash (which I think is great but overkill) imports them but (I think) because it works on a double entry basis importing produces crazy results due to duplication.

I have found a better solution which is to download ofx files from the bank (I get get up to 6 years). I attempted a test import into skrooge last night which seemed to work well.

There seem to be 2 preferred applications, skrooge and kmymoney.

Basically I don't need a double entry system but I do need to record manual and scheduled receipts and payments, cheques, transfers between accounts, and to be able to assign categories of income and expenditure. Ease of use is paramount as I would like to get it up and running asap.

Any thoughts on which of the two is better for my needs? Or (at the risk of opening the floodgates) are there any other ones that might be worth considering?

Thanks

Ian

[Detonate]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

I recently read a review of personal finance programs for Linux, and Skrooge was highly rated, Kmymoney was mentioned but not rated. I wish I could remember where I read this.

[Snowhog]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

That has peeked my interest. I too, am using Quicken 2002 in my VM of Windows XP. I've been thinking about switching to a Linux application, and have toyed with KMymoney. I didn't know about Skrooge. Just took a look at their home page.

If anyone here is using either application for their personal finances, I'd like to hear what you think. What do you like; what don't you like? Would you recommend one over the other, and why?

[The Liquidator]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

Thanks for the input

@snowhog

I've found that Quicken 2002 has run for several years in wine, in fact I bought it "new" but have run it for longer in a Linux installation than I have in Windows. However, it is Quicken Standard - I'm not sure how well other versions will run in wine.

Whatever I migrate to, I'm anticipating investing some time in setting it up. I would therefore be particularly interested in users views on:

1. The pluses and minuses of each one and
2. Whether there are any show-stoppers.

[claydoh]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

two basic differences between the 2:
kmymoney is more total-financial oriented -budgets, loans, investments and the like
skrooge is more checkbook-like

kmm can download transactions directly from financial institutions, or import downloaded files

Skrooge can only import the downloaded trasnactions

both are good imho, I use KMM as it downloads from my bank, but has many many features I will never use.

I have not used Skrooge extensively, KMyMoney I have used for years and has been rock solid the entire time. Plus the Devs are great folks who are great at communicating with their users from my own experiences.

[woodsmoke]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

I hadn't even heard of skrooge so I'm going to install it an take a look.
so...THANKS!!
woodsmoke

[The Liquidator]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

kmm can download transactions directly from financial institutions

Now that one is interesting, as it raises the possibility of automating the setup i.e direct downloading of the data to start me off. Am I on the right track there claydoh?

[claydoh]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

yes, the amount of past data is dependent on yor bank, though. I get almost a year from mine. Also note that you may have to pay an extra fee to the bank for this service, just as if you were using Quicken.

[The Liquidator]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

I can download up to 6 years of data in 1 year chunks at no charge I believe. I suspect the "1 year chunks" bit might mean manual downloads to kick it off, but I'll look into it further.

Thanks

[woodsmoke]

Skrooge 0.8.1 released

I've been setting the one in the repos up for use with my business. It works great and the listed improvements look nice.

An update was released Mar 17 2011.

http://skrooge.org/node/107

I did the update as shown in "downloads" on the site and they installed seamlessly.

One thing I like about it is that it shares a common interface with the other Koffice apps and for my tired old hands "swing in right" instead of "mousing up", saves a lot of work.

Thanks again Liquidator!

woodsmoke

[GreyGeek]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

I've been using KMyMoney for 5 years (that's how many years worth of data is showing when I unchecked "Hide reconciled entries"), and it is still very quick. Very easy to enter expenditures and deposits, or transfer between accounts. Lot's of reports and import capabilities. Very clean and functional interface.

[claydoh]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

I agree with GreyGeek. Skrooge is not bad in any way, but it's lack of online banking tools and an interface that is a bit too different for the staid and boring task of managing your finances

as a side note I maintain a ppa for the latest KMyMoney releases
https://launchpad.net/~claydoh/+archive/kmymoney2-kde4/
Lucid packages are being recreated, I could not get kmm 4.5.3 to build there so I may have to rebuild a previous version for 10.04.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

Claydoh, I have your PPA in my sources.list, but it doesn't show many KMyMoney packages.

I'm running KMyMoney 4.5.2, which I downloaded from SourceForge, which now offers 4.5.3 here. The install instructions are here, but doing that is not something I'd recommend for newbies. Besides, they are being rewritten since I used them several months ago.

The basic build instructions in the tar file are:

Go to the top level of the cvs working directory.
To build KMyMoney in the subdirectory ./build/ type

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
  to generate the Makefiles.
$ ccmake .
  to change the configuration of the build process. (optional) 

Congratulations, your Makefiles were generated!
Now you could just type

$ make
  to build the project in the build/ directory.

Note that 'make' automatically checks whether any CMakeLists.txt file
has changed and reruns cmake if necessary.

[claydoh]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

as i said, if you run Lucid, there are no packages for 4.5.3 yet, can't figure out the build failure there. 4.5.3 is in the PPA for maverick, Natty already has it in the normal repos. I have been using that ppa for years keeping folks updated on KMM, that's why the url still has kmymoney2 in it . Have not had any reports of 4.5.3 not upgrading, other than from Lucid users

A confusing part is that in Maverick, the default official package is called 4.5-2, which they really should have called 4.5.0-2. If you are in maverick, and running 4.5point2, please let me know if it is not upgrading. It could be a package-version numbering problem from after 4.5.1 0r 4.5.2. If so, uninstalling kmymoney and kmymoney-common and updating to see if the new version shows up may be necessary. I don't recall that issue recently, but that could be due to lack of reporting.

Also as far as I know, those compile instructions are pretty much correct, if you read a little more, you will see that you will have to replace

cmake ..

with

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=`kde4-config --prefix`

to account for where the distro puts it's libraries. For Debian/Ubuntu systems, you can replace the `kde4-config --prefix` with simply '/usr'

[woodsmoke]

Re: Skrooge or kmymoney?

WOAH!!!!

I have, as a policy, never done "online banking" except to "check my balances"....but....the new business may need that if it "takes off'...

I did not know this because....well, never tried....

Claydoh wrote:

++++++++++++++
Skrooge is not bad in any way, but it's lack of online banking tools
++++++++++++++

So, I'm gonna have to think about this at some time down the road...

Thanks Claydoh

woodsmoke