Personal finance manager

Question

I wonder if someone uses any personal finance manager on Ubuntu. I track my income and expenses in LibreOffice Calc and it works fine because I have set up everything I need the way I like. The issue now is that after a few years the file has become a bit slow to manage, so I am thinking that I probably need some specialised software to do it. Basically I need to add my expenses by category, track a few bank accounts and be able to pull stat on my expenses plus have a budget to make sure that I do not overspend.

I remember that I had tried GnuCash before and found it too complex. I'm not sure if I tried anything else. I also tried to do things on my phone. There are a few finance managers available, but I never liked them. I need something simple enough to be easy to set up, but also flexible to set it up the way I like.

Answer 1

GnuCash isn't complex. It's just different. Double-entry accounting is not at all hard to learn, but you have to think about your money in a more realistic way. It comes from somewhere, you store it somewhere, you send it somewhere.

I used Quicken when I was on DOS and OS/2, and switched to GnuCash when I switched to Linux. So I've used both methods. The only difficult part of the transition was importing my accounts. (This was maybe fifteen years ago, and lots of development has taken place since then.) What I did was start over; I kept my QIF exports in case I needed them for something, but I opened a new set of books for GnuCash.

It's January. Start anew with your record-keeping. There are YouTube tutorials on double-entry accounting and the GnuCash wiki and the mailing list are very helpful.