gnucash/README at master · Gnucash/gnucash
Description: gnucash - GnuCash Double-Entry Accounting Program.

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Gnucash/gnucash

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gnucash/README
695065a Jan 23, 2017
gjanssens Merge branch 'maint'

## Users who have contributed to this file

- linas
- jdavisp3
- derekatkins
- cstim
- jralls
- gjanssens
- wilddev65
- phil-davis
- jsled
- cmarchi
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| ############################################################
| GnuCash 2.6.x README file.
| The last known stable series is the 2.6.0 series.
| ------------------------------------------------------------
| ##################
| Table of Contents:
| ------------------
| - Overview
| - Dependencies
| - Invocation/running
| - Internationalization
| - Building & Installing
| - Supported Platforms
| - Additional Download Sites
| - Getting the Source via SVN
| - 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 Support: GnuCash also supports the German 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) or in portfolio of accounts (a group of accounts that can
| be displayed together).
| - 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.
| - New Multi-Currency Transaction Handling: GnuCash no longer
| requires separate currency exchange accounts to handle multiple
| currency transfers.
| - 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 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 NFS-mounted.
| - 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 MacOSX.
| In addition, some perl modules need to be installed. You can run the
| script 'update-finance-quote' as root to obtain the latest versions of
| required packages. This program requires an C compiler, which is
| generally already installed in Gnu/Linux and *BSD, but must be
| installed separately on MacOSX; on versions 10.6 and earlier, install
| Xcode from the distribution DVD or by downloading from
| http://developer.apple.com (you'll need to log in with your Apple ID);
| for 10.7 and 10.8, you can get Xcode for free from the App store. 10.9
| has a cool feature that detects an attempt to compile and offers to
| install the command-line build tools for you.
| Microsoft Windows users can use the "Install Online Quotes" program in the Start menu's Gnucash group.
| To use the OFX and HBCI import features you need to obtain
| the following;
| libofx: This library provide support for OFX file imports.
| GnuCash-2.0.0 and newer needs at least the version libofx-0.7.0
| or newer. Sources can be found at
| http://sourceforge.net/projects/libofx/
| aqbanking: This library provide support for HBCI and openOFX online actions.
| Three libraries, Ktoblzcheck, Gwenhywfar, and AQBanking, are required.
| All may be obtained from
| http://www2.aquamaniac.de/sites/download/packages.php
| #######
| 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
| <filename>", where <filename> 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
| ---------------------
| (For additional build system details, see doc/README.build-system.)
| GnuCash uses GNU Automake to handle the build process, so for most of
| the details, see the generic instructions in INSTALL. (If you are
| building directly from Git, read the README.git file for more instructions.)
| >>>>>>> maint
| Below we detail the GnuCash specific bits.
| Prior to building GnuCash, you will have to obtain and install the
| following packages:
| autoconf, automake, and libtool: Available at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu.
| RPM's and debs are widely available with most distributions.
| 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/
| What you'll need to get and install in order to make sure you have all
| of these pieces properly installed for your particular operating
| system flavor will vary, but here's at least a partial list of what
| you'll need for the systems we know about:
| Debian/GNU/Linux: see README.dependencies and
| current:
| libgnome-dev
| libwebkit-dev
| guile1.8
| libguile9-dev
| libguile9-slib
| SuSE:
| see README.dependencies
| GnuCash understands a few non-standard ./configure options. You
| should run ./configure --help for the most up to date summary of the
| supported options.
| If you only want a particular language installed, you can set the
| LINGUAS environment variable before you run configure. For example,
| to only install the French translations, run
| $ export LINGUAS=fr
| $ ./configure
| If you want to make sure that all languages get installed, run
| $ unset LINGUAS
| $ ./configure
| 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 --prefix you
| specify to configure determines where the resulting binary will look
| for things at runtime. Normally this determines where a "make
| install" will put all the files. However, automake also supports the
| 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 2.x is known to work with the following operating systems:
| GNU/Linux -- x86, Sparc, PPC
| FreeBSD -- x86
| OpenBSD -- x86
| MacOS X -- PPC and Intel, Versions 10.5 and later
| GnuCash can probably be made to work on any platform for which Gtk+ can,
| given sufficient effort. If you try and encounter difficulty, please join
| the developer's mailing list, gnucash-devel@gnucash.org.
| #########################
| Downloads
| -------------------------
| GnuCash sources and Mac and Windows binaries are hosted at
| SourceForge. 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/HEAD/
| 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.
| Submitting a Patch:
| Please read http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Development#Submitting_Patches.
| Thank you.

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