About GnuCash

GnuCash is a program to keep track of your finances. Its features include:

Advanced Features

GnuCash offers some features not found in simpler accounting programs.

Versioning

The versioning scheme for GnuCash parallels that of the Linux kernel, where "even" sub-versions indicate versions that are intended to be stable, only seeing maintenance to fix bugs, and "odd" sub-versions indicate an "experimental" stream that seeks to add enhancement.

The present "experimental" stream is gnucash-1.3.x, which is somewhat unstable.

The latest stable release is 1.2.x; if you don't intend to do development work, you should be using either this version, or an older 1.0.x version. These versions are fairly stable, with all currently known bugs fixed.

Once the 1.3.x series stabilizes, the next stable series will be 1.4.x, and experimentation will likely continue on 1.5.x.

If you wish to "hack" on the experimental version, you should first start by reading through the GnuCash Project Goals document in order to get some perspective on the overall design.

Lead Developers

Robin Clark
wrote the original X-Accountant in Motif as a school project, taking it to version 0.9 by October 1997.
Linas Vepstas
liked what he saw: the GUI was slick, the code was documented and well structured, and it was all GPL'ed. And so he re-wrote it: adding cell-widgets to XbaeMatrix, so that the combobox and arrows would make an even slicker GUI, rewrote the X-Accountant internals to add double-entry, an account heirarchy, split out a transaction mini-engine, add support for stocks, and spiff up the help menus. This was version 1.0 as of January 1998. Since then, for version 1.1, the engine was expanded and refined, and the register window code completely redesigned and made mostly Motif-(and GUI-)independent. Did some prototype OFX work.
Jeremy Collins
publicized the GnoMoney project widely and broadly, and then changed its name to GnuCash. Jeremy created the gnucash.org web site, registered the domain, got the initial GTK/gnome code working.
Rob Browning
abused everyone for not using perl, and then added guile/scheme support. Rob maintains the build infrastructure, is handling the whole guile/perl extension language thing, and is dealing with configuration and configurability.
Dirk Schoenberger
is working on the Qt/KDE port
Dave Peticolas
hacks obsessively on GnuCash. But he can stop anytime he wants to. Really.

Fixers and Patchers

The cast of thousands includes:

Andrew Arensburger
for FreeBSD and other patches
Matt Armstrong
for misc fixes
Fred Baube
for attempted Java port/MoneyDance
Dennis Björklund
Swedish translation
Per Bojsen
several core dump fixes
Christopher B. Browne
for perl stock scripts, Guile-based QIF import code, lots of changes to English documentation, and lots of guile code
Graham Chapman
for the xacc-rpts addon package
George Chen
for MS-Money QIF support
Albert Chin-A-Young
configure.in patch
Jeremey Collins
for GnoMoney and GTK port
Patrick Condron
for webserver and T1 connection.
Ciaran Deignan
for AIX binary version
Tyson Dowd
for config/make patches and debian maintenance
Koen D'Hondt
for Solaris patches to XmHTML
Bob Drzyzgula
for budgeting design notes
Jan-Uwe Finck
for German message translation
Ron Forrester
for gnome patches
Dave Freese
for leap-year fix
Bill Gribble
qif importation code
Otto Hammersmith
for RedHat RPM packaging
Alexandru Harsanyi
for fixing miscellaneous core dumps and lockups.
Jon K}re Hellan
for fixing miscellaneous core dumps and lockups.
Prakash Kailasa
for gnome build fixes
Tom Kludy
for SGI Irix port
Sven Kuenzler
for SuSE README file
Bryan Larsen
guile budget report
Ted Lemon
for NetBSD port
Yannick Le Ny
pour la traduction en francais
Grant Likely
gnome and engine patches
Heath Martin
major work on the gnome register
Matt Martin
guile error handling code
Robert Graham Merkel
reporting, gnome, and configuration patches.
Tim Mooney
port to alpha-dec-osf4.0f
G. Allen Morris III
for QIF core dump fix
Peter Norton
for a valiant attempt at a GTK port
OmNiBuS
web site graphics and content
Myroslav Opyr
for misc patches
Laurent P{'e}lecq
i18n patches with gettext
Alain Peyrat
for configure.in patches
Peter Pointner
motif and configuration patches
Gavin Porter
for euro style dates
Ron Record
for SCO Unixware and OpenServer binaries
Jan Schrage
documentation patches
Christopher Seawood
for XbaeMatrix core dump
Mike Simons
misc configure.in patches
Richard Skelton
for Solaris cleanup
Henning Spruth
for German text and euro date rework
Robby Stephenson
register patch
Herbert Thoma
gnome register patch
Diane Trout
scheme qif import patch
Rob Walker
guile and register patches
David Woodhouse
Great Britain translations
Ken Yamaguchi
QIF import fixes; MYM import

Supported Operating Systems

gnucash-1.0.18 (xacc-1.0.18) is known to work on the following systems:

History

The table below shows some historical lines-of-code and number-of-files counts for the X-Accountant/GnuCash development project
Historical Development Stats
Version engine register ledger motif gnome qt prefs (scm) docs (html) misc Total
xacc-0.9
Sept 97
- - - 34 files
(7.5+0.9)
- - - 5 files
(0.4)
- 39 files
(8.8)
xacc-0.9w
Dec 97
- - - 51 files
(13.8+1.5)
- - - 9 files
(0.8)
- 60 files
(16.1)
xacc-1.0.17
Feb 98
- - - 52 files
(14.8+1.8)
- - - 12 files
(1.4)
- 64 files
(18.0)
gnucash-1.1.15
Aug 98
24 files
(6.2+1.5)
31 files
(6.1+1.7)
5 files
(1.4+0.4)
30 files
(7.4+0.7)
17 files
(3.4+0.5)
16 files
(1.2+0.2)
3 files
(0.3)
16 files
(1.9)
not counted
(>1.0)
142 files
(32.9)

Each cell contains:

number of *c and *.h files
(KLOCS in *.c + KLOCS in *.h),

where KLOC == kilo-lines-of-code, as reported by wc.


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