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Similarly, in GnuCash every transaction involves money transferred from one account to another. Money never appears or disappears from thin air. In each case, money is transferred from one place to another, and the amount taken from one place must exactly equal the amount put somewhere else. When you buy a burger with that cash.you guessed it, it's a transaction (whether it's practical to account for personal burger purchases is another question).
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When you go to the ATM to get some cash for a night out, that's a transaction. When your paycheck goes into your account-another transaction.
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When you write a check to pay your phone bill, that's a transaction. So, how does double-entry accounting work in GnuCash? Every time you spend, receive or transfer money is a ``transaction''.
GNUCASH OPENING BALANCE FULL
While it's technically possible to use GnuCash for single-entry accounting, you'd be crazy not to take advantage of GnuCash's full abilities. If you are already familiar with double-entry accounting, you probably can't imagine working any other way. You'll find that double-entry is a powerful way of organizing your finances. While slightly more complex, double-entry accounting is a far more accurate accounting technique. While many other low-end accounting programs use a ``cashbook'' single-entry approach to accounting, GnuCash has always used a double-entry accounting system. It should also run on just about any platform to which GNOME has been ported. While GnuCash's primary development environment is Linux on x86, it has been successfully compiled and run under virtually all the architectures Linux supports, as well as FreeBSD/x86 and Solaris/x86. GnuCash uses the standard GNU build environment, so compiling is just a matter of typing.
GNUCASH OPENING BALANCE SERIES
The dependency on SWIG is likely to go away sometime in the next development series (1.5.x). In addition to a working GNOME development environment, you need Perl, guile, SWIG (available from ) and g-wrap, another tool now maintained by Gnumatic and available from the Gnumatic web site. These are intended for those who wish to get involved with where GnuCash is going, rather than its use in production environments.īuilding GnuCash can be a little problematic for some people as it requires the installation of a couple of uncommon build tools. Versions 1.5.x are the next development series. The current stable version is 1.4.9, but that may have changed by the time you read this. While GnuCash requires the GNOME libraries, it will run quite happily with any window manager, including KDE. Several distributions, including Mandrake, SuSE, Debian and Red Hat, also include GnuCash as part of their systems.
GNUCASH OPENING BALANCE DOWNLOAD
GnuCash is GPL software, so you can download the source code, as well as RPMs, from the GnuCash web site ( ). Development continues at a rapid rate, both through volunteers and employees of Gnumatic ( ), a company formed to support the continued development, marketing and productization of GnuCash and related projects. GnuCash 1.4, the current stable release, provides a simple, easy-to-use but powerful home accounting system. GnuCash developer, Robert Merkel, explains the functionality of the Quicken alternative.Ī refrain many Linux users and advocates hear again and again is ``The only reason I keep Windows around is for Quicken.'' Since 1997, the GnuCash Project (formerly known as xacc) has been working to provide an accounting solution for Linux.
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