# Overview

## Introduction

&app; is the personal finance software package made for you. It is versatile enough to keep track of all your financial information, from the simple to the very complex. It is one of the few financial software packages that supports global currencies, and it is the only open-source program of its kind. Best of all, &app; is easy to learn and use!

So, what can &app; do for you? It can keep track of your personal finances in as much detail as you prefer. If you are just starting out, use &app; to keep track of your checkbook. You may then decide to track cash as well as credit card purchases to better determine where your money is being spent. When you start investing, you can use &app; to help monitor your portfolio. Buying a vehicle or a home? &app; will help you plan the investment and track loan payments. If your financial records span the globe, &app; provides all the multiple-currency support you need.

&app; Chart of Accounts - Teaser

This image shows a Chart of Accounts with multiple currencies and investments.

While &app; is well suited for personal finances, it is also powerful enough for business use. There are many business features, from integrated accounts receivable and payable systems, to tax table construction. You will find these and the many other business features surprisingly powerful and easy to use.

## Features

### Easy to Use

Within a matter of minutes you will be able to enter your personal finance information and generate color graphs that represent your financial status. If you can use the register in the back of your checkbook - you can use &app;! Type directly into the register, tab between fields, and use quick-fill to automatically complete transactions. The interface is customizable from within the application itself.

- Easy to Use Menus: &app; menus conform to the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines. This means that they are simple and similar in appearance to many other GNOME applications.

- Documentation: &app; has built-in Help and extensive User’s Guide documentation.

- Import Methods: &app; supports many ways to input transactions besides manual entry. If you can access your bank accounts on-line, this is especially useful, as most banks and credit card companies support one of the following import methods. You will spend less time entering data and more time analyzing results.

  - Quicken Import File (QIF): Import Quicken QIF style files, a popular file format with many commercial personal finance software packages.

  - Open Financial Exchange (OFX): &app; is the first free software application to support the Open Financial Exchange protocol. Many financial institutions are moving towards this format.

  - Home Banking Computer Interface (HBCI): &app; is the first free software application to support the German Home Banking Computer Interface protocol. This protocol includes statement download, initiates bank transfers, and makes direct debits possible.

- Reports: &app; comes with over 30 prebuilt reports, including Account Summary, Income, Expenses, Transaction Report, Balance Sheet, Profit&Loss, Portfolio Valuation, and many others. Reports support graphical views of the data, including pie charts, bar charts, and scatter plots. The reports can be exported to HTML files, and are easily customized.

- Scheduled Transactions: &app; now has the ability to automatically create and enter transactions, or remind you when these transactions are due, giving you the choice of entering, postponing or removing the automated transaction.

- Mortgage and Loan Repayment Assistant: Used to set up a variable payment loan scheduled transaction.

- Easy Account Reconciliation: Integrated reconciliation makes reconciling your &app; accounts with statements simple and effective.

- Multi-platform Compatibility: &app; is supported on a variety of platforms and operating systems. The list of fully supported operating systems (and platforms) for &app; &vers-stable; is: GNU/Linux (x86, x86_64, Sparc, PPC), FreeBSD (x86, x86_64), OpenBSD (x86, x86_64), Solaris (Sparc), and MacOS X (Intel, PPC). Previous versions of &app; have been known to work with, SGI IRIX (MIPS), IBM AIX 4.1.5 (RS/6000), Unixware 7 (Intel), and SCO OpenServer 5.0.4 (Intel), but their current status is unknown.

### Tracks Your Investments

&app; has a number of investment features. From simple certificates of deposit to publicly traded stocks, &app; will track all your investments.

- Stock/Mutual Fund Portfolios: Track stocks individually (one per account) or in a portfolio of accounts (a group of accounts that can be displayed together).

- On-line Stock and Mutual Fund Quotes: With &app;, you no longer need look up your stock values one at a time. The process can be automated, to always present you with the latest value of your stocks.

### International Support

&app; is truly an application that works with and understands users from all around the world. There are many built-in features to facilitate interaction with the international world we live in today.

- Native Languages: &app; has been fully translated into 12 languages: Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish and Swedish. More than 25 other languages are partially supported.

- International Format Handling: &app; understands that different countries display the date and numbers differently. You are able to work with the date and number formats you are accustomed to.

- Multiple Currencies and Currency Trading: Multiple currencies are supported and can be bought and sold (traded). Currency movements between accounts remain fully balanced if "Trading Accounts" is enabled.

- On-line exchange rates: With &app;, you no longer need look up your exchange rates one at a time. The process can be automated, to always present you with the account values converted to your preferred currency using the latest exchange rates.

### Business Support

&app; has many features to support the needs of the business accounting community.

- Accounts Receivable/Payable: &app; has an integrated Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable system. You can track Customers, Vendors, Invoicing and Bill Payment, and use different Tax and Billing Terms in a small business.

- Depreciation: &app; can track depreciation of capital assets.

- Reports: &app; offers a wide variety of ready-to-use business reports.

### Accounting Features

For those knowledgeable in accounting, here is a list of &app;’s accounting features.

- Double Entry: Every transaction must debit one account and credit others by an equal amount. This ensures the books balance - that the difference between income and expense exactly equals the sum of all bank, cash, stock and other assets.

- Split Transactions: A single transaction can be split into several pieces to record taxes, fees, and other compound entries.

- Chart of Accounts: A master account can have a hierarchy of detail accounts underneath it. This allows similar account types such as Cash, Bank, or Stock to be grouped into a master account such as Assets.

- General Ledger: One register window can display multiple accounts at the same time. This eases the trouble of tracking down typing/entry errors. It also provides a convenient way of viewing a portfolio of many stocks, by showing all transactions in that portfolio.

- Income/Expense Account Types (Categories): These categorize your cash flow and, when used properly with the double-entry feature, will provide an accurate Profit&Loss statement.

### What’s New in &series-stable;

- &app; is available on Windows.

- The &app; file format is incompatible with versions earlier than 2.1.2. Specifically, scheduled transactions are stored differently. Using version &series-stable;, you can upgrade your older &app; file to the new format.

- More translations.

- Improved report handling.

- Fixed lots of crashes.

- Improved multi-currency support.

- Enhanced QIF import.

See http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Release_Schedule#Release_Schedule_for_2.2.x for detailed lists of improvements made in this series.

### What’s New in v2.0

- Gnome 2.0 (Gtk2)

  &app; is now using the latest tool-kits from gtk, and follows the normal Gnome2 HIG standards.

- UTF-8 support

  &app; now stores and reads each country’s special character sets by using UTF-8.

- Budget

  &app; now comes with a budget feature that can help you keep your expenses under control.

- Import of MT940 files

  Data files with transactions in MT940 format (as can be downloaded from some banks) can now be imported into &app;.

- Bug fixes

  &app; is now more stable and secure than ever before due to the long testing phase before we reached 2.0, as well as using more stable and mature libraries (gtk2 for instance). Numerous corrections has been made in every part of &app;, and too many for us to highlight any special area.

## About this Book

This manual’s goal is to save you time. It will get you started using &app; as quickly as possible.

Each chapter follows a simple format. A chapter begins with a Concepts discussion which introduces general themes and terminology, addressed and used within that chapter. How-To sections, which address specific procedures follow. Finally, a Putting It All Together section ends the chapter by giving detailed, concrete examples.

Beginning users will find the Concepts sections very helpful. They provide a reference for good ways to track your finances, and serve as a general introduction to financial background and terminology. Experienced users can flip to the How-To sections to quickly scan procedures. These sections provide to-the-point steps for accomplishing specific tasks. The Putting It All Together sections present real-world examples in the form of a tutorial. Beginning with creation of a file in chapter_basics, each successive chapter builds on the previous chapter’s tutorial.

This manual is organized into 3 main parts:

- Getting Started

- Managing Your Personal Finances

- Managing Your Business Finances.

Getting Started provides you with the most basic information needed to begin using &app;. Use this part as a quick-start guide. Its chapters will get you up and running:

- chapter_oview

- chapter_basics

- chapter_accts

- chapter_txns

Managing Your Personal Finances addresses common applications and features of &app; in greater detail. You will see more specific cases, based on frequently asked questions about applying &app; to everyday situations. Here are the applications and features covered in this part:

- chapter_cbook

- chapter_cc

- chapter_loans

- chapter_invest

- chapter_capgain

- chapter_currency

Managing Your Business Finances discusses the use of &app; in business accounting:

- chapter_dep

- chapter_bus_ar

- chapter_bus_ap

- chapter_bus_pay

- chapter_budgets

- chapter_other_assets

This manual also has an appendix, which contains extra information you might want to know:

- appendixa - Guide for former Quicken, MS Money or other QIF users

- appendixb

- appendixc

- appendixd

- fdl

Last, but not least, a glossary and index help you quickly locate topics.

## Top Ten Reasons to Use &app;

We’ve already discussed some of the general advantages of using &app;. Here are some specific features offered by &app; that may not exist in other programs.

1. Simple user interface

   &app; is as easy to use as a checkbook register. It’s simpler than a paper register, because auto-completion and other entry shortcuts not only do work for you, but reduce data entry errors.

2. Easy import

   &app; allows you to import data from on-line bank statements and software packages using QIF (Quicken Interchange Format), OFX and HBCI files. An easy-to-use assistant walks you through reviewing resulting changes and actually importing them into &app;.

3. Statement reconciliation

   Reconcile monthly statements quickly by entering the statement ending balance and checking off transactions. &app; helps you catch any discrepancies between your data and statements you receive.

4. Investment tracking

   &app; offers a host of ways to track your investment portfolio. Special investment accounts simplify data entry, and on-line tools allow you to update prices of your holdings as the markets change. Reports complete the picture, allowing you to analyze your investment decisions.

5. Multiple currency support

   &app; allows you to track multiple currencies. If you have bank accounts, investments or other financial data in different currencies, use &app; to monitor them.

6. Customized reports and graphs

   Reports and graphs give you valuable information for filing taxes, budgeting, or simply figuring out where your money goes. &app; offers a variety of easy-to-use reports and graphs to help analyze your financial position. It gives you the freedom to customize your own reports to suit your unique needs.

7. Double entry

   To provide complete records, &app; uses the double entry method of bookkeeping. Double entry simply means that money doesn’t just appear or disappear - an equal amount must come from one location and go to another location. By tracking the transaction in both locations, &app; will give you detailed reports from the perspective of either account.

8. Sources of help

   A Tip of the Day screen gives helpful tips to new users about &app; features. Within the program, a searchable Help menu guides you to information or connects to the &app; web page for further assistance. &app; also has strong, helpful developer and user communities who provide help through mailing lists as well as through the IRC channel.

9. Shortcuts

   &app; offers many shortcuts to help you enter data. Type the first few characters of a common entry and &app; will automatically fill in the rest! You can also use copy, paste and duplicate functions to save typing time. Keyboard shortcuts let you quickly choose a menu option or to enter numerical data. Many numeric entry fields can act as a calculator: enter "92.18+33.26" and watch &app; input the corresponding sum for you!

10. Open source

    &app; doesn’t hide its methods. If you wonder how &app; computed a number, you can find it out. In addition, you can set preferences that tell &app; how much information to display to you. There is no secret code used in &app; - it continues to be an open-source program.

These are only a few of the advantages you’ll discover when you start using &app; to track your financial information. Now get ready to enjoy the benefits of &app; for yourself!

## Installation

Installation of &app; can be simple, as most modern linux distributions come with &app; precompiled and ready to go. In fact, most likely, &app; is already installed. If you do not have &app; installed, the simplest method for installing it is to insert the installation CD that came with your distribution and follow the instructions.

The &app; home page contains detailed instructions on how to install &app; in the event your current distribution does not include it or you want to install a different version. You can also read the README file in the source code.