[Discuss] Finance software for Linux

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Thanks for the comments about TurboTax. Glad I'm an HRB (formerly TaxCut) user; the two used to be indistinguishable but now it sounds like TurboTax is going in an annoying direction. When HRB bought out TaxCut a few years ago, I feared it would quickly go downhill. We'll see if Intuit gets away with this in-app upgrade scheme and inspires HRB's execs to follow suit.

Meanwhile, I've continued with my 2-year experiment with Intuit's rival in desktop finance software, MoneyDance. Chosen because it runs on Linux and I've grown tired of running windows apps in a VM, I've been giving it more than a quick try-out. It has a mobile-sync app that lets you enter transactions into your phone, while you're thinking about them rather than a week or a month later and you're facing a pile of neglected paperwork. At least, that's the idea.

However, under a parent company "Infinite Kind", MoneyDance is suffering from neglect rather than greed. They put out 3 or 4 patch releases a year, but never seem to fix any of the core usability issues. The UI of Quicken '96 was more responsive and let you drill down on reports or to export data in much more obvious ways than the 2014 version of this app. 

Bug reports to tech support get blown off; for example, I got emailed a v27 version of a plugin they broke with a v32 update, only after I escalated a complaint that I wanted sync to work to my local drive rather than to DropBox. Their official line is that wifi connectivity is too hard to fix, so rather than debugging what broke in v32 of that plugin, they will drop support for local sync. There are dozens of other pesky annoyances, that essentially make it impossible to get your finance data into precise alignment with brokerage statements, tax software or various web apps.

GnuCash, I'm afraid, is even farther behind on the UI usability front. It's a great deal of engineering effort to create and maintain one of these apps, so open-source development is unlikely to ever embrace this category. It looks like the end of the road for desktop finance; the future is cloud services. But really, I'm a cloud-security developer: who can possibly trust the cloud with personal-finance data? (And it's hard to imagine a cloud app with the UI responsiveness of early versions of Quicken.)

I truly lament the state of this industry. White-collar crime (fraud directed at individuals) is going to accelerate as the desktop is swept aside.

-rich