For our September “Community Choice” Project of the Month, the community elected GnuCash, an easy-to-use personal and small-business finance manager with a checkbook-like appearance.
GnuCash is a highly-rated accounting software that’s freely licensed under the GNU GPL and available for GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows.
Designed to be easy to use yet powerful and flexible, GnuCash allows you to track bank accounts, stocks, income and expenses. As quick and intuitive to use as a checkbook register, it is based on professional accounting principles to ensure balanced books and accurate reports. Its features include double-entry accounting, stock/bond/mutual fund accounts, small business accounting, various reports, graphs and more.
GnuCash was previously voted “Community Choice” Project of the Month in March of 2015 and the GnuCash team spoke about the project’s latest developments and direction. Recently we caught up with one of the developers of the project, John Ralls, to find out how the project has been doing since then.
SourceForge (SF): What significant changes have occurred with your project since you were voted Project of the Month in March last year?
John Ralls (JR): Lots of bug fixes. We’re in the middle of our 3-year development cycle.
SF: Have any of your project goals changed since then?
JR: No.
SF: What project goals for the year have you achieved so far?
JR: We have a somewhat longer horizon, two development cycles or 8 years from the last release, for our current goals. To recap, those are to rewrite the core library in modern C++, to better enforce the MVC pattern, and to make GnuCash a database application rather than an application that can use a database as an object store. The eventual user benefits will be multi-user operation over the net and the ability to support more platforms–in particular mobile and Chrome.
SF: What can we look forward to with GnuCash?
JR: We’ve already got some new features ready for the next stable series expected in December of next year, and we expect that 2.8 will be a substantial stability improvement thanks to the C++ rewrite.
[ Download GnuCash ]