Part of a normal household is to have a budget for your economy. And as we are thinking on the possibilities for buying a house we need to have a clear view of our economy.

For many is the standard just to use a spreadsheet. Though it is easy to get started with using the spreadsheet, it does not provide a way for syncing between computers and to make more complicated setups with different  accounts and test for different financing possibilities.

 

So my wishlist is a personal financial application / budget software which we can use on my Linux workstation, Macbook laptop and Maries Windows laptop. As we both have iPhone and iPad a tool for viewing the reports on those devices must also be supported. A possibility is a web application running on a local web-server, as I don’t want to use a cloud service and hand over our financial information to third party.

It need to be able to import data from our bank and create grouping and reports based on this data.

 

Tools I have seen on

 

• moneyspire
  • Advertises itself to be an easy personal finance software, running on Linux, Mac, Windows and have an app for iPhone and iPad.
  • Regarding sync. In there support section they indicate that a cloud drive is needed and recommend Dropbox.
  • You manually need to save it to the cloud drive and load it from the cloud drive.
  • It cost $34.99 for the basic version and $69.99 for the plus version
• GnuCash
  • Is a personal and small-business financial-accounting software under GNU GPL license. It seems to have existed for many years.
  • It works under Linux, Windows and Mac.
  • There exist a DB backend for SQL, but not very used.
    • http://money.stackexchange.com/questions/27210/gnucash-and-version-control
    • http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/FAQ#SQL_Database
• MoneyDance
  • Personal Finance software with Linux, Windows and Mac versions. It does also have iPhone, iPad apps.
  • It cost $49.99
  • It seems to also use DropBox for syncing
• MoneyWiz
  • Another tool have options for Mac, Windows, iPhone/iPad.
  • Cost $24.99 for Windows and Mac versions. Have a number of subscriptions. Sync over its own servers.
• Mint
  •  Is a pure only service, so not for us. It does not seem to be able to run on a locale server.
• YNAB
  • You need a budget is pure only service. So not for us

 

Other links

 

• http://alternativeto.net/software/gnucash/?platform=iphone
• http://alternativeto.net/software/moneyspire/?platform=iphone
• http://lifehacker.com/5828438/five-best-desktop-personal-finance-tools