GNUcash is Great for Many Things
For a long while I have used GnuCash and some spreadsheets to manage my finances. GnuCash has excellent features for tracking income, expeses, assets, liabilities as well as business accounting features (invoices, receivables, and so on) that would be useful for an LLC but that I do not need for my household. It is not especially helpful, though, for projecting cash flow or making long-term projections. So I kept spreadsheets for that, plus a dashboard-style spreadsheet to track my overall current financial picture.
BreadSched is Born
Now that I no longer have a demanding day job, and AI-assisted coding has become good enough to be useful, I am building an application designed for my specific desires in a financial applicaiton. My initial requirements were:
- Written in Python, the language I am most comfortable with.
- Both a GTK interface and a web interface, so it works locally on Linux but can also be self-hosted, which will, I hope, eventually let me easily add transactions from a phone.
- Budgets and long-term projections that can be saved and altered to test different assumptions.
- Budgeting and projections driven by known scheduled transactions as well as scheduled estimates.
- Import of a GnuCash data file, since I have a lot of history in that data.
Current State
BreadSched is about 77,000 lines of Python, about 5,900 lines of JavaScript, and about 50,000 lines of tests (over 2,000 test functions). But it is still what I would consider “Alpha” state software and I wouldn’t count on it for day-to-day use. It does have most of the functionality I want and it continues to improve. The code and releases are freely available in a GitHub repo. The primitive installers aren’t signed yet and the best way to keep up is probably with a Python development environment. So I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone without a little bit of technical skill yet. But that said, feedback at this point is very much welcome.