Accounting software
Some time ago I've come across the accounting software comparison, which has some of the products referred from here. Some good product are still missing there (like AbilityCash).
Mostly I was impressed by Grisbi which is like jGnash and GnuCash. What was not satisfactory in this software:
They do not fit completely my requirement
Some of the are too complicated for home use
Some of them have usability gaps: autocompletion is not introduced, error messages are non-informative.
KMyMoney pleased me with a vast amount of features, most of which are not necessary for me. As a result in order to make a simple transaction I was lost in many menus and forms.
This all brings me to idea that I need to develop something custom. So I am on my way of requirement gathering. Right now I have the following requirements:
Accounts should be organized in trees. Account tree can be one of types (income → [giro bank account, salary, credit card account, cash], expenses → [credit interest, food, fuel, apartment → [rent, electricity, heating, drink water]])
Categories should be organized in trees. You can have as many category trees, as you wish (income → [won in casino, found on the street], expenses → [travel to London, visit of parents])
Each transaction should be associated with one source and one destination account
Each transaction might be optionally associated with one or more categories
Each transaction is given in any currency
When transaction is added, autocompletion should be enabled
Inline editing of transactions (table with editable cells)
Slitted transactions (composed of two or more simple transactions)
Special “currencies” support (such as liter, kg, etc)
Mini-calculator for amount entry (one can enter simple mathematical expressions)
Budget planning (warning a user, if he has exceeded the limit)
Should be Web application, compatible with most browsers
Multi-user support
Reports (multi-dimensional: period, account, category)
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Implementation details draft:
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Apache,
Perl (
HTML::Template, FastCGI, JSON), MySQL (innodb) on server side
or
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Tomcat on server side
GnuCash drawbacks to be solved:
No multiple categories support
Very dummy possibility to re-order transactions (simple up/down arrow is needed, no “index” column)
Update several transactions at once
Non-intuitive way to customize reports (I was not able to create a new one)
Not web-based, one cannot access the data without a special software
The major features of AbilityCash:
Accounts are organized as a tree
Categories (which are called attributes) are present
Three transaction types (income [single transaction], outcome [single transaction], transaction [involves two accounts])
Special currencies, like fuel (plus ability to synchronize with internet)
Changing several transactions at once
Budget planning
Possibility to customize default open tabs for commonly used account/attribute combinations
Repeating and planned transactions
Reports
Export/import to/from Excel
What AbilityCash lacks:
In-table editing
No autocompletion
Misc
