K * Digest!: Two Very Good KDE Financial Apps, KMyMoney And Skrooge, Get Recent Updates

When many people think of financial software, they probably think of Quicken or MS Money. Or on the Linux side of the house they may think of GnuCash. But did you know that our beloved KDE has not one, but two financial applications to handle all of your financial management and forecasting needs? That would be Skrooge and KMyMoney.

Both recently had version upgrades and the latest versions of both are available for users of Ubuntu / Kubuntu / Mint KDE / etc. etc.

Skrooge

The bugfixes and improvements for Skrooge are numerous! Although I have not looked at commits or development activity, it appears on the surface that Skrooge is under active development and constant improvement. In addition to a plethora of bugfixes, some of the highlights in the new version include:

Notifications and error messages are now based on KMessageWidget
The restore file is now base on KMessageWidget
Option to auto download from backend on opening file (default=false)
Import Microsoft Money documents (.mny) protected or not
Addition of russian banks
Reopen last page closed
Max and min limits on accounts
Better and new advices based on limits of accounts
Sound emmission on operation creation
Import "Budgetary allocation" and "Fiscal year" from Grisbi files as properties
Information message explaining how to exist full screen mode
Addition of date of last reconcilation on account
Amount owned on unit table
Download date on unit table
New account type: Pension
New set of categories for french people
Addition of "Configure notifications..." in configuration menu
Download and add bills as property by using boobill (weboob)
Rename of property
Export HTML and ODT from tables
JSON export based on QJson
Automatic process to recover a corrupted file
New "weboob0g" backend compliant with the Weboob 0.g

Whew! That's a lot of activity. The news page also highlights 48 bugfixes and "corrections". Want to try it? Simply add the PPA from the following Launchpad page: http://launchpad.net/~s-mankowski/+archive/beta

KMyMoney

KMyMoney has been around for a while - for at least the KDE 3.X days. For that reason, KMyMoney is generally deemed to be stable and relatively thoroughly tested. From the announcement page, new bugfixes to this version include:

Fixed the interaction with input method editors
Fixed a crash after editing a security
The ‘Use system colors’ setting was made a default setting
Fixed the rendering of a ledger entry when the ledger does not have focus
Fixed the persitency of some header settings like in the ‘Investments’ view
Fixed a crash when OFX update is cancelled while waiting for KWallet
Fixed a crash cause by a transaction with an empty postdate
Fixed a possible crash while mapping an OFX account
Added definition for new Azerbaijani Manat
Fixed the category selection actions in the find transactions dialog

Want to try it? Simply add the PPA from the following Launchpad page: http://launchpad.net/~claydoh/+archive/kmymoney2-kde4

Both Skrooge and KMyMoney handle all of the basic personal accounting functions with ease. Both will import .qif (Quicken) files and have extensive import / export capabilities, as well as reporting and forecasting functions. Both are under active development. Which to use would be simply a matter of personal taste. Support for both can be found on the Official KDE Forums.

Try them both out and let us know which you prefer (or a native / web alternative) and why. Thanks for reading!