Managing personal finance with Grisbi

Many of us wonder by the end of the month where our funds have gone. A financial management program can help – assuming you have some financial discipline. Simply, such programs show whence revenue comes and where expenses go. Grisbi  [1] belongs to the ranks of simple financial management programs for Linux. Although it doesn't support online banking, Grisbi lets you use categories to break down very precisely what money is used for what purposes.

A rather extensive, not to say complicated, configuration awaits you even before you start using the software. A configuration wizard poses many detailed questions about your managed account (Figure  1). Although the wizard recommends it, not all information is required before starting the program. You'll find many of the same dialogs that you can use later in Edit | Preferences .

Documentation

A real drawback of Grisbi is the accompanying documentation  [2]. A halfway decent manual exists in French  [3], but an English translation is currently lacking. The English wiki  [2] contains a small selection of (outdated) content that unfortunately explains less than one would wish. Some documentation is also on SourceForge, but it pertains to version 0.6, whereas the current version is 0.8.9, So, there's a lot of trial and error in figuring things out.

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