Keeping track of finances is a very important part of staying in the bank managers good books, whether as an individual or a small business.

Grisbi is an open source accounting program available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

The main page shows a summary of the different accounts that have been set up. These can include ordinary bank or cash accounts, liabilities (people you owe money to) or assets (for items such as computers that go towards your net worth).

There are no templates included for getting started, but setting up accounts is simple. By default the only currency available is the Euro. Grisbi can work with several currencies and convert between them if the exchange rate is supplied.

Grisbi does assume that you understand debits and credits and how they work in accounting. Most of the time this is not a problem but this can cause confusion if you don't know what you're doing.

It is possible to exchange information from Quicken Interchange Format and export information into the CSV format, ideal for importing figures into Excel.

Entering transactions is straightforward and they can be broken down into separate categories. For example a shop at the supermarket can be broken down into food and stationery values.

There are lots of categories and they are well organised. Can set up planned transactions for regular payments or income that does not change

Transactions can be modified or deleted until they are reconciled with the bank account. While useful, this is not accounting best practice and can create headaches of its own. It is better to enter a reversed transaction to balance any mistakes.

As a cross-platform program, Grisbi requires the GTK2 software. The link at the top of the article downloads a version with GTK2 included. There is a smaller file if this is already installed. If The Gimp photo editing software is already installed, GTK2 will be as well.

Reports sadly there are no templates for balance sheet or profit and loss account. This is a disappointment as these are very important, especially if the information is needed for a tax return.

There is some documentation online and there is an example accounts file. It gives some idea of how accounts can be set up although it is in French.

A selection of versions for different Linux distributions can be found here, and a Mac OS X version is also available.