############################################################ GnuCash 3.x README file. The current stable series is GnuCash 3.x. ------------------------------------------------------------ ################## Table of Contents: ------------------ - Overview - Dependencies - Invocation/running - Internationalization - Building & Installing - Supported Platforms - Additional Download Sites - Getting the Source via Git - Developing GnuCash ######## Overview -------- GnuCash is a personal finance manager. A check-book like register GUI allows you to enter and track bank accounts, stocks, income and even currency trades. A full set of reports allow you to see the state of your finances. The interface is designed to be simple and easy to use, but is backed with double-entry accounting principles to ensure balanced books. Features include: - An easy-to-use interface. If you can use the register in the back of your checkbook, you can use GnuCash. Type directly into the register, tab between fields, and use quick-fill to automatically complete the transaction. - Scheduled Transactions: GnuCash has the ability to automatically create and enter transactions, remind when a transaction is due, give a choice of entering a transaction or postponing it and remove an automated transaction after a certain period. - Mortgage & Loan Repayment Assistant: Used to setup a variable payment loan scheduled transaction. - Small Business Accounting Features: GnuCash can be used for Customer and Vendor tracking, Invoicing and Bill Payment, and using different Tax and Billing Terms in a small business. - OFX Import: GnuCash can import downloaded OFX/QFX files and retrieve account info and transactions via OFXDirect. The results are passed through a transaction matching system that accurately picks duplicate transactions and assigns contra accounts based on similar previously-imported transactions. - HBCI/FinTX Support: GnuCash also supports the German FinTS (formerly Home Banking Computer Interface protocol which includes statement download, initiate bank transfers and direct debits. - Quicken File Import: Import Quicken QIF style files. QIF files are automatically merged to eliminate duplicate transactions. - Reconcile window with running reconciled and cleared balances makes reconciliation easy. - Stock/Mutual Fund Portfolios: Track stocks individually (one per account). - Get Stock & Mutual Fund quotes from various web sites, update portfolio automatically (more funds being added regularly). - Reports: Display Balance Sheet, Profit&Loss, Portfolio Valuation, Transaction Reports, or account balance tracking, or export them as HTML. You can write your own custom report if you know a little Scheme. Reports can be run over any arbitrary period. - Multiple Currencies & Currency Trading: Multiple currencies are supported and can be bought and sold (traded). Currency movements between accounts are fully balanced when double-entry is enabled. - Chart of Accounts: A master account can have a hierarchy of detail accounts underneath it. This allows similar account types (e.g. Cash, Bank, Stock) to be grouped into one master account (e.g. Assets). - Split Transactions: A single transaction can be split into several pieces to record taxes, fees, and other compound entries. - Double Entry: Every transaction must debit one account and credit another by an equal amount. This ensures that the "books balance": that the difference between income and outflow exactly equals the sum of all assets, be they bank, cash, stock or other. - Income/Expense Account Types (Categories): These serve not only to categorize your cash flow, but when used properly with the double-entry feature, these can provide an accurate Profit&Loss statement. - General Ledger: Multiple accounts can be displayed in one register window at the same time. This can ease the trouble of tracking down typing/entry errors. It also provides a convenient way of viewing a portfolio of many stocks, by showing all transactions in that portfolio. - Written in C/C++ with embedded scheme support via Guile. - File access is locked in a network-safe fashion, preventing accidental damage if several users attempt to access the same file, even if the file is on a shared file system. - SQL storage is supported using MySQL, Postgresql, and SQLite3. Note that this does not support multiple concurrent access. Home Page: http://www.gnucash.org/ Precompiled binaries: http://www.gnucash.org/download ############ Dependencies ------------ The following packages are required to be installed to run GnuCash: [see README.dependencies] The optional online stock and currency price retrieval feature requires Perl. This is generally already installed on Gnu/Linux and *BSD, and MacOS. In addition, some perl modules need to be installed. You can run the script 'gnc-fq-update' as root to obtain the latest versions of required packages. Microsoft Windows users can use the "Install Online Quotes" program in the Start menu's Gnucash group; it will install perl and all of the required modules more-or-less automatically. MacOS users will find "Update Finance Quote" in the distribution disk image; it will automate running gnc-fq-update for you. ####### Running ------- For GnuCash invocation details, see the manpage in doc/gnucash.1. You can also run gnucash --help for the command line options. You can start GnuCash at the command-line, with "gnucash" or "gnucash ", where is a GnuCash account file. Sample accounts can be found in the "doc/examples" subdirectory. *.gnucash files are GnuCash accounts that can be opened with the "Open File" menu entry. *.qif files are Quicken Import Format files that can be opened with the "Import QIF" menu entry. GnuCash responds to the following environment variables: GNC_BOOTSTRAP_SCM - the location of the initial bootstrapping scheme code. GUILE_LOAD_PATH - an override for the GnuCash load path, used when loading scheme files. It should be a string in the same form as the PATH or LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. GNC_MODULE_PATH - an override for the GnuCash load path, used when loading gnucash modules. It should be a string representing a proper scheme list. It should be a string in the same form as the PATH or LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. GNC_DEBUG - enable debugging output. This allows you to turn on debugging earlier in the startup process than you can with --debug. #################### Internationalization -------------------- Message catalogs exist for many different languages. In general GnuCash will use the locale configured in the desktop environment if we have a translation for it, but this may be overridden if one likes. Instructions for overriding the locale settings may be found at http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Locale_Settings ##################### Building & Installing --------------------- GnuCash uses CMake to handle the build process. Details are available in cmake/README_CMAKE.txt (If you are building directly from Git, read the README.git file for more instructions.) Prior to building GnuCash, you will have to obtain and install the following packages: cmake: Available https://cmake.org. ninja: Optional, available at http://ninja-build.org. CMake can generated build rules for Ninja, and generally using Ninja results in faster builds that Makefile based ones. gnome development system: headers, libraries, etc. libxml2: available from ftp.gnome.org SWIG: 2.0.10 or later is needed. See http://www.swig.org or http://sourceforge.net/projects/swig/ Generally, up-to-date build instructions for various Linux distributions can be found on the GnuCash wiki at https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Building The options that the CMake build system understands are documented in cmake/README_CMAKE.txt and in the Building wiki page mentioned above. Note that while you need the Gnome libraries installed, you don't need to have a Gnome desktop. Runtime and install destinations are separate. The CMake option CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX determines where the resulting binary will look for things at runtime. Normally this determines where a "make install" will put all the files. However, cmake also supports the DESTDIR variable. DESTDIR is used during the `make install' step to relocate install objects into a staging area. Each object and path is prefixed with the value of `DESTDIR' before being copied into the install area. Here is an example of typical DESTDIR usage: make DESTDIR=/tmp/staging install This places install objects in a directory tree built under `/tmp/staging'. If `/gnu/bin/foo' and `/gnu/share/aclocal/foo.m4' are to be installed, the above command would install `/tmp/staging/gnu/bin/foo' and `/tmp/staging/gnu/share/aclocal/foo.m4'. DESTDIR can be helpful when trying to build install images and packages. NOTE: If you have installed different parts of Gnome in different places (for instance, if you've installed webkit in /usr/local) you will need to set the environment variables GNOME_PATH and GNOME_LIBCONFIG_PATH. See the manpage for gnome-config for more details. ################### Supported Platforms ------------------- GnuCash 3.x is known to work with the following operating systems: GNU/Linux -- x86, Sparc, PPC FreeBSD -- x86 OpenBSD -- x86 MacOS -- Intel, Versions 10.9 and later GnuCash can probably be made to work on any platform for which Gtk+ can and for which there is a C++11 compiler available, given sufficient expertise and effort. If you try and encounter difficulty, please subscribe to the developer's mailing list, gnucash-devel@gnucash.org and we'll try to help you. ######################### Downloads ------------------------- GnuCash sources and Mac and Windows binaries are hosted at SourceForge and Github. Links for the current version are provided at http://www.gnucash.org. We depend upon distribution packagers for GNU/Linux and *BSD binaries, so if you want a more recent version than your distribution provides you'll have to build from source. ############################## Getting Source with Git ------------------------------ We maintain a mirror of our master repository on Github. You can browse the code at https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash. Clone URIs are on that page, or if you have a Github account you can fork it there. ################## Developing GnuCash ------------------ Before you start developing GnuCash, you should do the following: 1. Read http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Development 2. Look over the doxygen-generated documentation at http://code.gnucash.org/docs/MASTER/ or http://code.gnucash.org/docs/MAINT/ 3. Go to the GnuCash website and skim the archives of the GnuCash development mailing list. 4. Join the GnuCash development mailing list. See the GnuCash website for details on how to do this. 5. Build the branch you want from a git clone of our repository and make sure that your build passes all of the tests and runs correctly. Submitting a Patch: Please read http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Development#Submitting_Patches. Thank you.