6 best personal finance apps for Linux

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Manual data entry is much less problematic. Double-click an account name to launch the register, then use the section at the bottom of the screen to begin adding a transaction. The Description section remembers previous entries (Tesco, BP, Future Publishing, etc), which makes adding this information easy, and then you just need to define the incoming and outgoing account for the transaction before adding the amount and any notes. The accounts in question here correspond to either categories or payees (depending upon how you like to work), and, while these are not difficult to add or modify, it'd be better if we could do this while adding transactions to the register.

If you're a small household and don't need all the bells and whistles, Buddi is a good choice. It's small, portable and has a good but basic feature set. A growing number of plugins add features such as QIF import, different skins and some online sync capabilities. If your ambitions are slightly more complex, however, you should give this a miss, because you'll probably grow out of it quickly.

Grisbi is a native GTK application that, like many other packages here, is designed to be easy to use and comprehensive. It employs a series of tabs that, while initially slightly confusing, give you rapid access to various elements of the software such as scheduled transactions, the register and payees. In use, Grisbi feels more like an email client than a traditional financial application, which makes navigation fluid. Just select an option, make the changes on the left edge (or bottom for transactions) and hit the Apply/OK button.

Our test data imported accurately and it was easy to turn a monthly download into a series of scheduled transactions using the context-sensitive menu. Reconciliation of downloaded data with manually added transactions was also painless, with the split-screen interface being put to good use. Export also worked well, with options available for QIF and CSV, however, there's no password protection or encryption support available yet, so you'll need to be careful with data and backups.

Grisbi kicks against the usual interface conventions (to a point) and makes a more familiar experience for those not versed in accounts software. It does the job of maintaining home accounts well and is highly recommended, especially if you've tried other personal finance software and found the interface unintuitive. The only caveat is that you should encrypt your backups and, depending on how your PC is used, the main GSB file itself, to keep the data secure.

We liked JGnash's simplicity. By default there are just three accounts: one is the account itself, the second takes care of income and the third expenses. When adding data, you add a payee to the system and you can use the Memo space to categorise the transaction. If you want to create extensive reports, a real category-based approach may be more suitable, but if you want an option that's simple to use and update, this is a better idea.

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