How to find a best free budgeting application for small business and personal users in 2011? What are the top budget planning tools that help financial managers efficiently spend limited budgets? This article will try to give you the simplest answers for these two questions and provide an easy guide for selecting and downloading a top-rated free or open source budget planning software program.
Good budgeting software can help a budget planner easily and efficiently make budget planning and forecast, calculate project costs, manage limited budgets, process budget expenditure, and do budgeting analysis. A commercial budget planning software could cost up to hundreds of US dollars, which could be too expensive for a budget manager or a small business owner who is looking for a cheaper or free planning solution. In this circumstance, a free and open source financial budget software system could be a good choice.
Best Free and Open Source Financial Budget Software Download and Comparison
There are a lot of kinds of open source budgeting management software systems available for free downloading online. For example, GnuCash is free open source budget manager software for personal household users and small business. It supports different operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
GnuCash integrates the functional modules of QIF, OFX and HBCI import and transaction matching, scheduled transactions, financial calculations, and financial reports and graphs. These functions are very helpful for budget management. At the same time, GnuCash is also a fully-featured small business accounting software system, which allows a user to integrate the budgeting program into his or her company’s whole financial management system.
To download GnuCash for free, just go to the Download Page and choose a version for your operating system from the Download GnuCash 2.4.0 block. For installation, go to the document page and download the Help Manual and the Concepts Manual.
Gnucash is not the simplest and easiest budgeting program. If a user does not like it, he or she can try other top free or open source household and business budget software programs. They include Mint, Grisbi, MySpendingPlan, JGnash, PhreeBooks, KMyMoney, LedgerSMB, and Buddi. Mint is a popular free online budgeting system for personal users and small business. MySpendingPlan is a Web-based online envelope budget planning and management system. A user can download and try them or more from Internet before choosing a right solution.
How to Reduce the Costs of Free Open Source Budgeting Software Programs
Open source software companies are not charities. They make money from the commercial supports for their free downloadable software packages. This means that if you do not pay you can not get supports from the professional team of an open source company.
On the other hand, some of the most popular open source software programs have well-developed communities. A user can seek for free help from the developers and technical enthusiast and find many support resources from a good community. So the quality of a community is a most important factor for reducing the costs of an open source application. Of course, if a user does not need any change or support for a simple and easy to use budget scheduling and analysis software tool, he or she can only consider and compare the functions and features of the software.
Related Articles:
Best Free Financial Budgeting Forecasting Planning Software
Best Free Open Source Scheduling Software Download Review
Chen Nanyang - Chen Nanyang's journalist career began in 2002 when he started writing for China's Nanfang City News, Singapore's United Morning Post and ...
Join the Conversation