Open Source financial systems

[Daniel McNamara]

GnuCash is certainly an appealing option if I could indeedget it to play 
ball without X and add in a decent HTML interface. As for the "GST 
awareness" well my knowledge of the tax system and record requirments is 
somewhat limited so I was hoping that might be as simple as you've 
decribed here as it means there are a number of other web based systems 
which I could easily adapt for the requested purpose.

Cheers

Daniel

Conrad Canterford wrote:

> I'm not sure how strict your "no X" requirement is. Before you get mad
> keen on rolling your own from scratch, have you considered just writing
> an HTMLish front-end for gnucash? The port to Gnome 2.0 will start very
> soon, and a part of that will be a clarification of the split between
> the front-end and the engine (they're a little confused at the moment
> because there has only been one front-end for a long time). Gnucash is
> an X application and I'm not sure that the engine components are as
> divorced from the X environment as they might be. The build system
> certainly isn't. However, they're things that can be fixed if someone
> wants to put in the effort to do so.
> 
> This approach strikes me as being a much better solution, as you get the
> stability of the gnucash engine, and all you need to add is the
> appropriate user interface stuff to make it work how you'd like.
> 
> As for "GST awareness" - you don't need any special stuff to do that
> with any half-decent accounting program. All it is is a split
> transaction, with one amount (the GST portion) being put into one
> account, and the rest into another. I do this all the time with gnucash
> now, despite it not "supporting" it officially. Its not automated, but
> its so easy to do that it isn't a problem.
> Of course, if you wanted to embed the functionality of that into your
> user interface, that would be fine (though I'd hope you'd make that a
> configuration option!).
> 
> Anyway, just a thought for you to consider. If you want to talk to the
> developers in almost-real-time, try connecting an IRC client to
> irc.gnome.org.au and join the channel #gnucash. Unfortunately most of
> them are Americans, so bear that in mind when hoping to get answers.
> Alternatively you can subscribe to gnucash-devel at gnucash.org through the
> home page www.gnucash.org .
> 
> Conrad.
> Gnucash "developer" (read "tester and bug-finder").