GnuCash is free, open source software that offers personal financial management and professional bookkeeping capabilities.
The launch of the new version of GnuCash 5.0 was recently announced ; it is an open source system for individual financial accounting.
GnuCash provides tools for tracking income and expenses, maintaining bank accounts, managing information about stocks, deposits and investments, and loan planning.
GnuCash also allows for accounting and balance (debit/credit) management for small businesses. It supports importing data in QIF/OFX/HBCI formats and displaying information in charts.
GnuCash's business features are quite extensive, particularly for a free product, and include double-entry bookkeeping functionality, a checkbook-style ledger for tracking income and expenses, and the ability to handle transactions in a variety of currencies.
Automatic account statement reconciliation is also available in GnuCash, with bank transactions automatically downloaded and matched against system transactions.
GnuCash 5.0 main news
In this new version of GnuCash 5.0, it is noteworthy that the menus and toolbars have been migrated from the GtkAction and GtkActionGroup APIs to the GAction and GActionGroup objects.
Another change that stands out in this new version of GnuCash 5.0 is the addition of a new stock market assistant (Stocks > Stock Market Assistant) that allows you to perform various investment operations with stocks, bonds, and mutual funds.
In addition, we can also find that a new report on investment lots has been added (Reports > Assets and liabilities > Investment lots), which generates a graph of capital investment growth and losses for investment lots.
The online quotes system has been completely rewritten, with the old programs for extracting stock value information, gnc-fq-check, gnc-fq-dump, and gnc-fq-helper, being replaced by finance-quote-wrapper. The code for extracting prices from online services has been rewritten in C++.
In the "New/Edit Account" dialog box, a new "More Properties" tab is proposed to set the upper and lower limits of the account balance, when these limits are reached, a special indicator will be displayed.
Of the other changes that stand out in this new version of GnuCash 5.0:
- The separate menus for importing in MT940, MT942 and DTAUS formats have been replaced by the general menu “Import from AQBanking”.
- The possibilities of defining the reporting logic in the Guile Scheme language have been significantly expanded.
- The reporting and general ledger functionality has been completely rewritten in C++ using SWIG to link to the Guile Scheme code.
Finally, if you'd like to learn more about this new version of GnuCash 5.0, you can find the details in its official announcement. The link is here.
For those interested in obtaining the project code or installing it, please note that the code is provided under the GPLv2+ license. There is a GnuCash variant for Android. Ready-to-use builds are available for Linux (flatpak), macOS, and Windows.
How to install GnuCash 5.0 on Linux?
This accounting system is available in almost all Linux distributions, so you can install it with one of the following commands, depending on your distribution:
To install GnuCash on Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives, run the following command :
sudo apt install gnucash
For Fedora, CentOS and derivatives we run :
sudo yum install gnucash
If you have openSUSE, you must run this command :
zypper install gnucash
For Arch Linux and derivatives, we run :
sudo pacman -S gnucash
On the other hand, if you like installing applications using Snap packages, GnuCash has its own Snap package , but the only drawback is that it hasn't yet been updated to its latest version in the Snap Store.
But you can be on the lookout as soon as it is updated.
To install it through snap you just run:
sudo snap install gnucash-jz
Finally, for those who prefer to install the flatpak package, they can do it with the following command:
flatpak install flathub org.gnucash.GnuCash