This article provides an overview of open-source software for personal finances, the top open-source personal finance applications, and how to choose the best open source personal finance software for your needs. Open-source software offers exceptional benefits to users, but is it right for everyone? The answer often depends on your particular needs and situation.
If you’re looking for the best open-source personal finance software, this article will show you some of the best programs available. You should be able to find a piece of software on this list that can help you save money and build wealth!
To be financially successful, one needs to know how to manage their funds. There are high chances of making mistakes while calculating expenses manually within spreadsheets. Probably, this is why you would tend to look for an automated personal finance tool to do your bidding.
Personal finance tools like the ones listed below can go a long way in helping you manage your costs. Each of these tools can help you create budgets, track your spending, and much more. Keep track of your money, and spend wisely to enhance your savings.
Open Source Software
1. GnuCash
GnuCash is a free accounting software offering some basic yet essential accounting features. It’s ideal for small businesses, startups, and individuals who like to track their finances effectively. Unfortunately, GnuCash continues to be a single-user tool, which means you won’t be able to add any more users to your account.
Given this constraint, this product is an ideal addition to a sole proprietor’s financial kitty, but not capable of supporting a growing business. Despite being open-source software, its features are pretty extensive for a free offering.
Here’s what you can look out for with GnuCash:
- Double-entry
- Accounting functionality
- A checkbook-style register to track both income and expenses
- Multi-currency conversion standards
- Automatic banking transactions download and reconciliation
- Bill payment reminders
While small businesses and individual users can use the aforementioned features, medium-sized and large companies can make use of these exclusive features:
- Accounts payable (A/P)
- Accounts receivable (A/R)
- Customer and vendor management
- Budgeting and reporting
2. HomeBank
HomeBank, being a personal finance software, houses some user-friendly reports to help people figure out where they’re spending their money. It also helps individuals set up rules for importing transactions. Probably the best part is that it supports almost all modern formats for importing reports into the platform.
Some widely used reporting formats include, but are not limited to, OFX/QFX, QIF, and CSV. This is not all, for this open-source tool is equipped to handle multiple currencies too. HomeBank is available on most Linux distributions by default, so you can rest assured the installation is not going to be too complex.
When you log in, you need to create an account, especially if you are accessing the portal for the first time. Once you create an account, you can either import compatible files or start entering transactions.
Unlike some of the other options available in the market, you don’t have to master double-entry bookkeeping to manage your expenses with HomeBank.
Some additional features include:
- Pre-applied categories to segregate and analyze your daily transactions
- Excellent budgeting features allow you to plan for your future
- Exhaustive reporting features, like bar charts, pies, budget spending, trend reports, and a balance report, amongst others.
3. KMyMoney
What makes KMyMoney stand out is its widespread usability, along with its familiar user interface. If you have been a Windows user before moving to Linux, there is a high possibility you might have used Quicken and MSMoney for balancing your checkbook and tracking finances.
If yes, then KMyMoney will be a cinch to master and access. Transfer your existing records gracefully or start with a fresh slate. This tool’s clean interface proves to be an effective personal finance management tool with a flat learning curve.
One size doesn’t fit all; and for this reason, KMyMoney is not best suited for business transactions. On the contrary, it is an ideal solution for individuals and SMBs.
Setting up the software is relatively straightforward; define your banks and transaction centers, followed by your most commonly used accounts. Each of these groups into savings, current, and credit cards.
Some features worth reckoning:
- KMyMoney supports different account types, along with income and expense categories.
- Reconcile your bank accounts with the help of online banking support and statement downloads within the OFX and HBCI protocols.
- Align brokerage accounts with their respective investment accounts.
- KMyMoney scheduler’s feature offers numerous options for handling recurring transactions.
4. Money Manager Ex (MMEX)
Finance software may not sound like one of the most exciting software you can install on your computer, but it’s undoubtedly one of the best. Money Manager Ex (MMEX) aims to try and be simple enough for a layman, yet, it continues to be powerful enough to keep demanding users happy.
If you’ve been using a spreadsheet to manage your money until now, then rest assured, Money Manager Ex’s import feature will get you up and running in no time at all.
Some plus points of this software are its approachable interface, easy-to-access SQLite database with AES encryption, and unending support for various currencies, which is ideal for overseas transactions.
Unlike some of the other software, Money Manager Ex is an entirely offline application. You can’t pull in bank statements automatically or make online payments.
Once you have all the basic setup directions out of the way, you might be able to get around to using the tool for managing your finances. The program provides you with a raft of tools to analyze your spending and make future predictions, all with simple maintenance.
5. Skrooge
Skrooge is an excellent tool for devising budgets, tracking income/expenses, and running simulations drawn from different decisions despite its uncanny name. For a layman used to using spreadsheets, Skrooge is an enticing alternative towards managing personal finances.
Skrooge comes with its dashboard and separate tabs, which include the following:
- Managing accounts
- Operations
- Scheduled operations
- Trackers
- Payees
- Categories
- Budget
- Search and progress
- Report
- Monthly report
- Units
- Simulations
Unfortunately, using this tool is not as easy as one would like it to be. The interface is a little clunky; there are many tabs and an ‘n‘ number of fields to navigate through.
Nevertheless, its dynamic database allows you to categorize multiple transactions in one go, all with custom tags.
6. Akaunting
Akaunting is free and online accounting software that really has a modern and fluid design. If someone won’t want to install it on their systems, they can also use the pre-hosted cloud Akaunting application available on the official website.
This open-source accounting software for managing finances is designed for personal to small business usage.
It is a web application that after downloading need to be placed in a web server locally or remotely. Akaunting developed using modern technologies such as Laravel, Bootstrap, jQuery, Swift Mailer, API etc.
The user can generate invoices, accept online payments and keep track of expenses.
Akaunting online open source accounting software
Furthermore, other features of it are online accounting thus support wide range of devices; customer management; Create and manage bills; multi-currency support; inventory tracking and manage goods; financial reports; multilingual; Configure permissions on a Role level; Discount; Automatically create invoices, revenues, bills, and payments; Create unlimited bank and cash accounts; easy invoice; app store to extend Akaunting capabilities and more…
7. HomeBank
HomeBank is a free and open-source to manager personal accounting. It has easy to understanding interface to create charts and financial reports. Being a cross-platform tool, we can install it on OpenBSD, Linux, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, macOS and AmigaOS.
The macOS version of the HomeBank has been ported by the third party called macports.org which is an open-source community initiative for macOS.
On popular Linux distros, we don’t need to add any third-party repository for its installation and the default one is enough. For example, if you want to install the HomeBank on Ubuntu or Linux Mint operating systems then simply open the Command terminal and use the below command:
sudo apt install homebank
It is lightweight accounting software and will take only a few seconds to get installed on the system.
HomeBank financial software for personal usage
The best thing about HomeBank is it supports all major currencies, 56 languages and always up to date.
HomeBank features similar to one want from free accounting software. We can set initial or minimum balance available in our account along with bank account number just for reference and while doing entry it will automatically manage the account details. It offers Bank, Cash, Credit card, Asset account type management. The user can import accounts from Quicken or Microsoft Money including other financial management software in support formats such as QIF, OFX, QFX, and CSV.
Other features of Home Bank are Dynamic reports creation, duplicate-transaction detection; split transactions; budgeting tools and more…
8. Spreadsheets
While all five of these options are well-supported and regularly updated, my final pitch is to not even use a personal finance tool at all, but instead to use spreadsheets to manage your financial data. Yes, there’s a lot to be said for having a dedicated budgeting tool. There’s less reinventing of the wheel involved, and you don’t have to worry as much about messing up complex formulas. You also have the peace of mind of knowing that there are others out there who have exactly the same setup and can help you out when you get stuck. And you also need to be careful to not store personally identifiable information like account numbers in plain text, particularly if you store or back up your data to a shared location.
But the vanilla spreadsheet isn’t a terrible tool either. In terms of the ease of customization, it can’t be beat. Custom charts and graphs are easy to generate, and you can track additional data alongside your accounts to get a clearer picture of your spending. Open source tools like LibreOffice Calc or Gnumetric offer great functionality and expandability to track your finances your way.
Personally, I use a mix of tools. I use a personal finance tool to store the raw data and for getting an idea of what my accounts look like at a glance. But for more complex operations, I turn to a trusty spreadsheet to drill down to exactly what I want to know, particularly when I want to pair the data with other personal information I collect. For example, I have a device in my car that tracks trips via GPS; by pulling out gasoline purchases, I can pair this information to see my exact cost per mile for every trip. Or I can pair restaurant spending with the personal health metrics I collect to see the correlation between how often I eat out and how my weight fluctuates.
9. Grisbi
Grisbi is a free, open source personal accounting and finance manager, It supports multiple currencies, has a user-friendly interface, supports budget management, with advanced reporting.
Platforms: Linux, Windows and Mac OSX.
What’s the Best Personal Finance Tool to Use?
Depending upon your need of the hour, you can pick and choose the software that works best for you. Each tool is free to download and is highly compatible with Linux and its varied distros.
Conclusion
Open-source software is free to use and edit. Most of it is available to download for free, and can be found on the Internet. Not only does it help financially, but it also helps non-profit organizations by giving them more software choices. Personal finances are a very serious matter, and knowing the best open source personal finance software will help you organize your money and make the most of your budget. Use these free, or low-cost programs to see all of your accounts in one place and keep detailed records of spending.
From budget tracking to personal finance software, open-source software has got you covered. While many financial applications are available for free through banks and financial planners, there is no substitute for the dollars and cents in your pocket. While most of the personal finances apps are web-based, some are perfect to use on your desktop, laptop or even your mobile device.