The Temple of the Mighty Bague

After a fairly lengthy compile (hey, it’s a KDE app) I had 99% of my concerns addressed as soon as the application booted.

Right there, on the home page, is exactly the information I was looking for - not just my current balances, but what they’ll be in 5,10, 40, etc days.

I quick rummage through the new interface reveals a wealth of new features which go even further than Money in a lot of ways:

• Each account can now be given a hard and soft limit. For example, you can set your current overdraft limit in your current account and even tell KMyMoney to alert you when you cross a user-defined threshold.
• There’s a whole budgeting section giving me control over every aspect of financial planning that I could think of at the time.
• Not only has the lack of forecasting been addressed, there’s a whole section of the application dedicated to forecasting and planning.
• All of this ties in with a massively expanded reporting engine, producing multiple types of customisable charts, graphs and textual reports. Want your 90 day cash flow line graph (like I do)? Just plug in the dates and flag it as a favourite report and it’s there.

I really can’t praise KMyMoney CVS enough - it does absolutely everything I want it to do, so my Windows partition is finally going to be converted to a /home partition.

One thing I can’t comment on yet is the stability - I’m running the current bleeding-edge CVS build after all. My plan is to subscribe to the developers announce list so I can get a heads up on any potential show-stoppers. Obviously, I’ll also need to take backups a little more frequently, but that’s a small price to pay

Yet another free application that shows the commercial boys how it’s done.

One of the few things that keeps a windows VM lying around for me is Microsoft Money. It’s one of the few applications that Microsoft have actually made a pretty good job of.

My judgment of this, though, is pretty superficial. Money provides a nice pretty cash-flow graph that lets you see, at a glance, if you’re at risk of crossing the evil overdraft limit line.

In an attempt to finally shake off the specter of windows, I periodically look at the free alternatives available and, after reading this blog, I thought it was perhaps time to give KMyMoney a look.

Rather than importing my (extensive) money files, I thought a good way to evaluate the software would be to set up a set of accounts from scratch, including all my regular scheduled bill payments. This was satisfyingly easy - actually quicker and less painful than Microsoft’s offering.

Having everything in, though, the one glaring hole I can see is that it’s all past-based - there seems to be very little in the way of forecasting other than the scheduled payments. This makes it awkward - I like to be able to evaluate whether or not a purchase is helpful by seeing what it does to my cashflow over the following weeks and months and KMyMoney just doesn’t seem to do that - at least with the current release.

So, I’m going a step further and installing the current CVS build, which the developers claim has a lot of shiny new stuff and seems pretty close to release. So, it’s compiling as we type and I’ll post my thoughts later.