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)
• Import/export to CSV, …

Implementation details draft:

1. YUI on client side
2. Apache, Perl (HTML::Template, FastCGI, JSON), MySQL (innodb) on server side

or

1. GWT on client side
2. 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

• AbilityCash
• Grisbi, jGnash
• KMyMoney
• GnuCash¹⁾
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