Brief: GnuCash is a popular free and open-source accounting software that can be used to manage personal finance as well as business transactions.
Considering the complexities of managing personal finances and business transactions, you will find a lot of online services or software tools that aim to simplify things. Some tools simply let you add expenses and income to keep track of your savings while others offer different features.
I have already covered several open source account software in the past. Here, I will be focusing on one of the options — GnuCash, which is a popular free accounting software with plenty of features for every user.
GnuCash: Free & Open Source Accounting Software
GnuCash is a free accounting software tailored for professional requirements to track transactions, stocks, etc. It is available for Linux, BSD, macOS, and Windows as well.
Even though it can be overwhelming to start with, it is easy to use for managing personal transactions as well. You can get a detailed report to analyze after you’ve started managing an account and added transactions to it.
Features of GnuCash
As I mentioned earlier, GnuCash comes loaded with a bunch of features which could be overwhelming for someone new to accounting, but I think it should be worth it:
- Double-entry Accounting
- Stock/Bond/Mutual Fund accounts
- Small-business accounting with tax support (like GST in India)
- Detailed report for breakdown
- Graph for easy analysis
- Financial calculations support
- Auto-saving feature
- Color coding
- Online Banking Wizard
- Journal
- Loan repayment calculator
- Price database for quick calculation
- Budget balance sheet, flow, graph for each category
- Ability to export as CSV
- Add Customer, Vendor, and Employee records separately
- Scheduled transactions
- Ability to set a Budget
- Configuring bill generator to ease up the accounting process
I’m no expert but this is just the tip of the iceberg. You will find a host of options to customize and set for your accounting needs.
Installing GnuCash on Linux
You can find GnuCash in the software center of your Linux distribution. Install it from there or use the package manager of your distribution.
A Flatpak package is also available for those who want the latest version. In case you didn’t know, I’d suggest you to go through our Flatpak guide.
Alternatively, you can build it from source or you can head to their official download page to explore options for your Linux distribution.
Wrapping Up
For basic personal finance management, it was a little overwhelming for me because I prefer to use an Android app for simplicity. However, if you take a look around for a few minutes, it is easy to understand and GnuCash seems flexible for most requirements.
If you like to manage your or your business’s finances, you may give it a try. It is definitely better than keeping data in spreadsheet :)
