About QFinance

QFinance is a simple book keeping application written in Python.
QFinance stands for _q_uick (and dirty) _f_inance management.

I wrote QFinance because I found maintaining a spreadsheet to troublesome.
Especially I disliked the startup time a full-grown spreadsheet application
naturally requires, just because I want to enter that I had bought breakfast
on the way because I missed a train (or similar).

Please note, that I am not particularly educated on financial topics.
Therefore I simply use colloquial terms for certain concepts, which might
be wrong in a certain situation if you ask a finance expert.

The home on the internet for QFinance is on sourceforge:
http://qfinance.sourceforge.net/

Copying

Copyright (C) 2011 Daniel J. Lauk

QFinance is licensed under the GNU GPL (v3). For details see the file
gpl-3.0.txt or view it online.

Usage

QFinance is all about simplicity and quick entries. Therefore it primarily
provides a command line interface to its commands. If you feel like it, you
may of course program a GUI on top of these commands (QFinance is open source
software after all), but I personally don't think that it will make things
easier.

Tutorial / Quick Start

Download QFinance and install it. For this tutorial this includes setting up
a convenience access method (on Unix like operating systems (Linux, BSD,
Mac OS X) use an alias or a symlink; on Windows create a Batch file
somewhere on your PATH).
See the installation instructions for more details.

Please note that the instructions resemble a typical Unix style BASH prompt.

What are we going to do?

• Set up the data directory
• Set up the configuration file
• Create two new accounts
• List the accounts
• Add single entries (cash flow in or out of an account)
• Add double entries (cash flow from one account to another account)
• List the accounts balance
• Modify (i.e. correct or fix) an entry
• Search for an entry
• Delete an entry

Step-by-step guide

qf help
qf add 2.50

Installation

Here are some (hopefully) easy to follow instructions to set up QFinance on
various platforms.

Unix

This section covers Unix like operating systems (e.g. Linux, BSD, Mac OS X,
...).

Windows

This section covers Microsoft Windows operating systems. The instructions are
specifically for Windows XP (because I only have access to that). But you
should easily be able to apply them to more recent versions of Windows, too.
(If you know about particular specifics on a certain version of Windows,
please consider contributing to the documentation.)

Mac

If you run Mac OS X, please refer to the section Unix. If you run another
version of Mac OS, I cannot help you. Sorry.
(If you know what to do, please consider contributing to the documentation.)

File format

QFinance uses simple text files for storage. This allows you to migrate
your data easily to another system if you ever want to.

The file format is as follows:

• Each entry is on a single line
• Lines starting with ; or # are comments
• Empty lines are ignored
• Each line is formatted like this
  • Date in format YYYYMMDDHHNN
    • To reduce precision just omit the parts not known.
      E.g. if you know that you bought something in January 2010,
      but you don't remember when exactly, write 201001.
  • Amount of money in with an optional leading + or -
  • Notes (optional)
  • regular expression: \d{6}(\d{4})?\s+[+\-]?\d+(\.\d\d)?(\s+.*)?
  • Examples:
    • 20101225 20.00 From aunt Sally for Christmas
    • 201012311034 -19.95 Fire crackers for New Year's party

Resources

• GPL online: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/