Opale

From Freehackers

Opale is the more simplistic personal bank account manager ever. It basically boils down to what is called bank reconciliation and previsions (or planning), with lot of graphics added.

I use it to follow and check my bank accounts, but most importantly to clearly see what will happen, financially, in next months/years. One could say as a financial planning manager.

Opale is based on the K Desktop Environment for linux and other unices. A Qt4-only version is on development. (expect a release in march 2008)

Opale is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2, and is written by Thomas Capricelli. (Copyright 2001-2008 Thomas Capricelli).

 Release of Opale 0.9 11 November 2008, by Thomas Capricelli
 
 Release of Opale 0.8.3 2 January 2008, by Thomas Capricelli
 

[edit] Quick and dirty links

• The obligatory screenshots page.
• Follow the Quickstart to see what kind of things Opale can do.
• The latest released source can be found on the download page.
• The manual details the use of all features.
• There is a list of frequently asked questions that you may want to check.
• There is no mailing list yet. But feel free to come on irc #freehackers on freenode. (irc://irc.freenode.org/freehackers).

[edit] Introduction

Looking at people around me, I can see two kind of way of handling bank accounts. There is those that just plain don't, and those that do care a lot, using such beasts as GnuCash or Grisbi, juggling with several accounts, assets and so on.

All those words I just dont understand and do not want to understand.

Still, I like to know what's going on with my bank account, if everything went as expected, and if not, what went wrong ? when ?. Another very important point for me is that I like to anticipate, to predict, so that I can take wise decisions regarding my money. I seem to be the only one having this way of doing, so I haven't found the simple application to help me do that.

Hence, I did it, that's what free software is all about. I'm still wondering whether someone else will find it useful, but I can tell you I use it every day and I'm happy with it.

[edit] What Opale is

Every month or so, you get a bank report. Usually on some paper, but nowadays you can have it in a computer file using internet. That is useful. Anyway, what I've always done, is to compare this paper, with my expectations. Moreover, I usually have a quite precise idea of the main movements on my account for the several next months, or even years. I mean things like salary, power/phone/internet bills. So, basically, that's what Opale is all about : I fill all what I've paid and what I expect to pay in Opale, and I know what will happen in next years. The accuracy of this estimation is of course closely related to what I have entered. Once a while, using internet or my paper bank report, I compare ("Check") to see if everything goes as expected. And I feel reassured. When I intend to do something important, like buying something expensive, or stopping my job, I can see how it impacts the future, and it helps me making my decisions. It did actually help me a lot.

[edit] What Opale is NOT

Opale is certainly not a personal finance manger, like GnuCash, Microsoft Money, or Grisbi. Those ones do a lot of complicated things that Opale does not, and will never do. These tools are great, but for other purposes. For example, I do use Grisbi for other stuff.

Of course, I keep in mind that it is important that Opale and those applications (at least the free software ones) cooperate. Opale uses an open format, based on XML, which is very easy to understand. (I can even help if someone asks).

[edit] Bug report

Opale is using a bugtracking system to handle bug reports, wishes and feature requests. You can either use the menu entry in Help or click on this link directly

Choose "Report Issue", and choose "Opale" (of course). Take care of choosing the right "Severity", especially, choose "Feature", if you want to ask for a new feature.

[edit] Development

Opale depends on Qt and the KDE libraries. I'm testing using gcc3/gcc4, x86/amd64 on several distributions (gentoo,debian,fedora,opensuse). There should be no/few problems with compiling Opale on any platform where KDE runs.

• Opale bugtracker where Opale bugs are handled.
• Browse API documentation
• Opale makes use of the freehackers builbot for automatic builds.

To compile Opale from source, do something like this, from within the main directory:

 mkdir build
 cd build
 cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$KDEDIR
 make
 sudo make install

[edit] Get the code

This project is using mercurial to handle the source code.

You can get the latest package/tarball from

• Zip file
• tar.bz2 file
• tar.gz file

You can browse the code online (and make diff or take snapshots)

If you're familiar with source control, you can get the code by cloning the mercurial repository (And hence you'll be able to update later on) using the following command (or your favorite mercurial UI client in Windows/MacOS)

 hg clone http://sources.freehackers.org/hg.cgi/Opale

and then update it using

 hg pull -u

[edit] Other projects by Thomas Capricelli