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gnucash

Gnucash is a project mainly written in C and SCHEME, based on the View license.

Gnucash, the open source cross-platform accounting application

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############################################################ GnuCash 2.4.x README file.

The last known stable series is the 2.4.0 series.

################## Table of Contents:

  • Overview
  • Dependencies
  • Invocation/running
  • Internationalization
  • Building & Installing
  • Supported Platforms
  • Additional Download Sites
  • Getting the Source via SVN
  • Developing GnuCash

######## Overview

GnuCash is a personal finance manager. A check-book like register GUI allows you to enter and track bank accounts, stocks, income and even currency trades. A full set of reports allow you to see the state of your finances. The interface is designed to be simple and easy to use, but is backed with double-entry accounting principles to ensure balanced books.

Features include:

  • An easy-to-use interface. If you can use the register in the back of your checkbook, you can use GnuCash. Type directly into the register, tab between fields, and use quick-fill to automatically complete the transaction. The interface is customizable from within the application itself (no editing config files :) )
  • Scheduled Transactions: GnuCash now has the ability to automatically create and enter transactions, remind when a transaction is due, give a choice of entering a transaction or postponing it and remove an automated transaction after a certain period.
  • Mortgage & Loan Repayment Druid: Used to setup a variable payment loan scheduled transaction.
  • Small Business Accounting Features: GnuCash now can be used for Customer and Vendor tracking, Invoicing and Bill Payment, and using different Tax and Billing Terms in a small business.
  • OFX Import: GnuCash is the first free software application to support the Open Financial Exchange protocol that many banks and financial services are moving to use. The development of OFX and HBCI support has also resulted in an improved transaction matching system that more accurately picks duplicate transactions.
  • HBCI Support: GnuCash is the first free software application to support the German Home Banking Computer Interface protocol which includes statement download, initiate bank transfers and direct debits.
  • Quicken File Import: Import Quicken QIF style files. QIF files are automatically merged to eliminate duplicate transactions.
  • Reconcile window with running reconciled and cleared balances makes reconciliation easy.
  • Stock/Mutual Fund Portfolios: Track stocks individually (one per account) or in portfolio of accounts (a group of accounts that can be displayed together).
  • Get Stock & Mutual Fund quotes from various web sites, update portfolio automatically (more funds being added regularly).
  • Reports: Display Balance Sheet, Profit&Loss, Portfolio Valuation, Transaction Reports, or account balance tracking, or export them as HTML. You can write your own custom report if you know a little Scheme. Reports can now be performed over an accounting period!
  • Multiple Currencies & Currency Trading: Multiple currencies are supported and can be bought and sold (traded). Currency movements between accounts are fully balanced when double-entry is enabled.
  • New Multi-Currency Transaction Handling: GnuCash no longer requires separate currency exchange accounts to handle multiple currency transfers.
  • Chart of Accounts: A master account can have a hierarchy of detail accounts underneath it. This allows similar account types (e.g. Cash, Bank, Stock) to be grouped into one master account (e.g. Assets).
  • Split Transactions: A single transaction can be split into several pieces to record taxes, fees, and other compound entries.
  • Double Entry: When enabled, every transaction must debit one account and credit another by an equal amount. This ensures that the "books balance": that the difference between income and outflow exactly equals the sum of all assets, be they bank, cash, stock or other.
  • Income/Expense Account Types (Categories):
    These serve not only to categorize your cash flow, but when used properly with the double-entry feature, these can provide an accurate Profit&Loss statement.
  • General Ledger: Multiple accounts can be displayed in one register window at the same time. This can ease the trouble of tracking down typing/entry errors. It also provides a convenient way of viewing a portfolio of many stocks, by showing all transactions in that portfolio.
  • Written in C with embedded scheme support via Guile.
  • File access is locked in a network-safe fashion, preventing accidental damage if several users attempt to access the same file, even if the file is NFS-mounted.
  • Provides a byte-stream format, which allows accounts and account groups to be transmitted to other processes via pipes or sockets.
  • International date handling, many different translations.
  • New User Manual and Help: A brand new user help has been written which focuses on how to do tasks in conjunction with a Tutorial and Concepts guide that gives the user background information on using GnuCash.
  • Redesigned Menu's: The GnuCash menu's have been redesigned to conform more with the new GNOME Human Interface Guidelines.

Home Page: http://www.gnucash.org/

Precompiled binaries: http://www.gnucash.org/pub/gnucash/

Development versions: http://www.gnucash.org/en/hacking.phtml

############ Dependencies

The following packages are required to be installed to run GnuCash:

[see README.dependencies]

To be able to use certain features of GnuCash, such as reports and network stock price downloads, you must have the following packages below installed (in addition to those listed above).

perl: Almost any version of perl5 should work. I run perl-5.004

In addition, some perl modules need to be installed. You can run the script 'update-finance-quote' as root to obtain the latest versions of required packages.

To use the new import features (OFX and HBCI) you need to obtain the following; libofx: This library provide support for OFX file imports. GnuCash-2.0.0 and newer needs at least the version libofx-0.7.0 or newer. Sources can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/libofx/ aqbanking: This library provide support for HBCI online actions.

####### Running

For GnuCash invocation details, see the manpage in doc/gnucash.1. You can also run gnucash --help for the command line options.

You can start GnuCash at the command-line, with "gnucash" or "gnucash

", where is a GnuCash account file. Sample accounts can be found in the "doc/examples" subdirectory. *.gnucash files are GnuCash accounts that can opened with the "Open File" menu entry. *.qif files are Quicken Import Format files that can be opened with the "Import QIF" menu entry.

GnuCash responds to the following environment variables:

GNC_BOOTSTRAP_SCM - the location of the initial bootstrapping scheme code.

GUILE_LOAD_PATH - an override for the GnuCash load path, used when loading scheme files. It should be a string in the same form as the PATH or LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable.

GNC_MODULE_PATH - an override for the GnuCash load path, used when loading gnucash modules. It should be a string representing a proper scheme list. It should be a string in the same form as the PATH or LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable.

GNC_DEBUG - enable debugging output. This allows you to turn on debugging earlier in the startup process than you can with --debug.

#################### Internationalization

Message catalogs exist for many different languages. These are enabled with environment variables. For example,

Francais, in bash: export LANG=fr_FR

Francais, in tcsh: setenv LANG fr_FR

German version: export LANG=de_DE

##################### Building & Installing

(For additional build system details, see doc/README.build-system.)

GnuCash uses GNU Automake to handle the build process, so for most of the details, see the generic instructions in INSTALL. (If you are building directory from SVN, read the README.svn for more instructions.) Below we detail the GnuCash specific bits.

Prior to building GnuCash, you will have to obtain and install the following packages:

libtool: Available at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu. RPM's and debs are widely available with most distributions.

gnome development system: headers, libraries, etc.

libxml: available from ftp.gnome.org

SWIG: 1.3.28 or later is needed. See http://www.swig.org or http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1645 (Note: g-wrap has been dropped completely in gnucash 2.2.0 and is no longer needed.)

texinfo: If you are building from SVN, you need the GNU texinfo package, version 4.0 or later.

What you'll need to get and install in order to make sure you have all of these pieces properly installed for your particular operating system flavor will vary, but here's at least a partial list of what you'll need for the systems we know about:

Debian/GNU/Linux: see README.dependencies and current: libgnome-dev libwebkit-dev guile1.8 libguile9-dev libguile9-slib

SuSE: see README.dependencies

GnuCash understands a few non-standard ./configure options. You should run ./configure --help for the most up to date summary of the supported options.

If you only want a particular language installed, you can set the LINGUAS environment variable before you run configure. For example, to only install the French translations, run

$ export LINGUAS=fr $ ./configure

If you want to make sure that all languages get installed, run

$ unset LINGUAS $ ./configure

Note that while you need the Gnome libraries installed, you don't need to have a Gnome desktop.

Runtime and install destinations are separate. The --prefix you specify to configure determines where the resulting binary will look for things at runtime. Normally this determines where a "make install" will put all the files. However, automake also supports the variable. DESTDIR is used during the make install' step to relocate install objects into a staging area. Each object and path is prefixed with the value ofDESTDIR' before being copied into the install area. Here is an example of typical DESTDIR usage:

 make DESTDIR=/tmp/staging install

This places install objects in a directory tree built under /tmp/staging'. If/gnu/bin/foo' and /gnu/share/aclocal/foo.m4' are to be installed, the above command would install /tmp/staging/gnu/bin/foo' and `/tmp/staging/gnu/share/aclocal/foo.m4'.

DESTDIR can be helpful when trying to build install images and packages.

NOTE: If you have installed different parts of Gnome in different places (for instance, if you've installed webkit in /usr/local) you will need to set the environment variables GNOME_PATH and GNOME_LIBCONFIG_PATH. See the manpage for gnome-config for more details.

################### Supported Platforms

GnuCash 2.0.x is known to work with the following operating systems:

GNU/Linux -- x86, Sparc, PPC Solaris -- Sparc FreeBSD -- x86 OpenBSD -- x86 MacOS X -- PPC

Previous versions have been known to work on the following platforms, but their current status is unknown:

SGI IRIX -- MIPS IBM AIX 4.1.5 -- RS/6000 http://www-frec.bull.com/ Unixware 7 -- Intel SCO OpenServer 5.0.4 -- Intel

See http://www.gnucash.org/pub/gnucash (high-bandwidth) or http://linas.org/linux/gnucash (slow-www ) for precompiled (but very old) binaries for these platforms

GnuCash can probably be made to work with most POSIX-ish platforms, provided the libraries and toolchain are available.

######################### Additional Download Sites

You can also download GnuCash from:

  • http://download.sourceforge.net/gnucash

You can download GnuCash Solaris packages from:

  • http://www.unixrealm.com/downloads/

You can get GnuCash Mandrake packages on Mandriva Cooker sites.

Precompiled binaries & pre-requisite packages can be found at the following sites. The GnuCash versions here are all extremely old, and were indeed from GnuCash's ancestor "x-accountant".

IBM AIX 4.1.5 -- SMIT-installable images -- warning, this is from the 1.0 series of xacc http://www.bull.de/pub/ see also http://www-frec.bull.com/

SCO OpenServer 5.0.4 http://www.sco.com/skunkware/osr5/x11/apps/xacc/VOLS.tar -- this is from the 1.0 series of xacc

Unixware 7 -- use pkgadd to install http://www.sco.com/skunkware/uw7/x11/apps/xacc/xacc.pkg.gz

SGI Irix -- in SGI install format -- warning, this is a very down-level version http://linas.org/linux/xacc/xacc-1.0b7-sgi-irix.inst.tar

############################## Getting Source with Subversion

A read-only version of the svn tree is available on the net at:

http://svn.gnucash.org/repo/gnucash/

To get what used to be CVS HEAD (and now includes what used to be gnucash-gnome2-dev), you will need to get the svn TRUNK:

svn checkout http://svn.gnucash.org/repo/gnucash/trunk gnucash

The argument "gnucash" above can be whatever you want your local directory to be called, and is optional. If you leave it out, you'll have a directory called "trunk" created containing all the source code.

If you want the latest 2.0.x code, you'd need to pull from the 2.0 branch, as follows:

svn checkout http://svn.gnucash.org/repo/gnucash/branches/2.0 gnucash-2.0

################## Developing GnuCash

Before you start developing GnuCash, you should do the following:

  1. Read http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Development

  2. Several of the directories under src contain files called design.txt which explain many aspects of GnuCash's design. Read those.

  3. Go to the GnuCash website and skim the archives of the GnuCash development mailing list.

  4. Join the GnuCash development mailing list. See the GnuCash website for details on how to do this.

Submitting a Patch:

Once you have done some work that you would like to submit, you need to send a patch. There are two ways to submit a patch. First, if you're using SVN and only made changes to existing SVN files you can generate the patch using:

  svn diff > /tmp/mypatch

and attach it to the appropriate bug or enhancement request in Bugzilla (https://bugzilla.gnome.org). Create a new bug if you don't find one that's applicable. Please don't submit patches to either of the mailing lists, as they tend to be forgotten.

If your patch adds new files, use the `-N' flag to diff between a clean directory and your development directory. E.g.

$ diff -urN {gnucash-pristine} {gnucash-mydevel} > /tmp/mypatch

Thank you.

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