Articles tagged: accounting

FLOSS personal accounting 101

481 days ago

Yesterday I went to the LUV Beginners Workshop. This was the second one I’ve been to. I’m still not sure if I’m there as a beginner or a beginner-helper.

I was admonished many months ago to start practicing personal accounting. It seems like a sound idea, so my task this weekend is to find a free software accounting package I can live with, and dig into it a bit.

Starting points:

According to Synaptic, my options are HomeBank, GnuCash, KMyMoney and Grisbi. Wikipedia only lists JGnash as an additional contender, so I decided to ignore it and try out the first four.

First lesson: Download software before going to The Hub. There may be free wifi, but it’s not that great.

It seems that GnuCash and KMyMoney offer double-entry accounting, unlike HomeBank and Grisbi. I don’t know what this means yet, but it seems to be important. In addition, GnuCash initially started out mimicking Quicken, and KMyMoney mimicking Microsoft Money, so if you are familiar with either of those, this could be a good starting point.

A first look at websites:

  • Grisbi’s FAQ is only available in French. This doesn’t give me a lot of hope for being able to easily get help.
  • KMyMoney’s site is just a Sourceforge one, which doesn’t load for all of Saturday. That doesn’t give me great hope.

Accounting software uses some rather unnecessary similes to explain how accounting works. KMyMoney goes with water flowing in a pipe; another mentions “beans” that need to be kept together (in an account) to stop them going all over the place. WTF? I think people trying to use accounting software have at least arrived at the concept of receiving income and having expenses.

I start with GnuCash, but I hit the wall with setting up my expense accounts. It’s an accounting wall rather than a software one. Is it OK to make phone and internet part of utilities, or is there some intrinsic reason they are never included there? Which category stucture will end up being more useful?-

  • Work-related expenses
    • Event fees [conferences, seminars etc]
    • Travel
    • Dining
  • Volunteer-related expenses
    • Event fees
    • Travel
    • Dining
  • Personal/entertainment expenses
    • Event fees
    • Travel
    • Dining

OR

  • Event fees
    • Work-related
    • Volunteer-related
    • Personal
  • Travel
    • Work-related
    • Volunteer-related
    • Personal
  • Dining
    • Work-related
    • Volunteer-related
    • Personal

You see?

Some categories have income/expense implications, e.g. I can claim work-related expenses, and maybe I can claim reimbursement for volunteer-related expenses, but does that mean they should be a top level account?

Perhaps I could just start with it and change it later if I find it unsuitable, but that would potentially make it hard to make meaningful comparisons over different time periods, which I gather is half the point of recording every damn movement your money makes anyway.

Anyway, any suggestions about sensible accounting/expense structures would be most welcome!

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