Update, 10 January 2008: I ended up going with KMyMoney. See “Moving from MS Money to KMyMoney”. I had to give up classifications as described below, but still, KMyMoney is an excellent replacement for Money.

One of my bigger challenges with moving to GNU/Linux from Windows will be to migrate eleven years worth of MS Money data to GnuCash. (Apparently, GnuCash is the financial application to use, but please let me know if there are good alternatives to evaluate.)

With .QIF exports and imports, it may not be too excruciating to move the data, but I think getting the reports I want will be a challenge. I haven’t fully explored GnuCash reports yet, but so far I don’t see what I want.

I’m using classifications with MS Money and hope I’ll be able to find something similar with GnuCash. For example, in the automobile category, I have gas, maintenance, and repair subcategories. Two classifications would be “1998 Saturn” and “2001 Honda.” Then I can see what total spending is for a sub-category and also break it down by vehicle.

I think I can manage this with GnuCash because it looks like you can have any number of category levels, so maybe I’ll have this:

automobile:gas:1998 Saturn
automobile:gas:2001 Honda
automobile:maintenance:1998 Saturn
automobile:maintenance:2001 Honda
automobile:repairs:1998 Saturn
automobile:repairs:2001 Honda

And then I need to figure out if I can get reports that let me mix and match the numbers. I don’t use graphs so much as tables. I might want to see consolidated numbers:

                  2004     2005     2006    Total
Automobile
  gas             $900    $1100    $1400    $3400
  maintenance     $500     $378     $670    $1548
  repairs         $576     $279     $987    $1842

Total            $1976    $1757    $3057    $6790

Or by “classification”:

2006             Saturn    Honda      Total
Automobile
  gas              $800      $600     $1400
  maintenance      $370      $300      $670
  repairs          $750      $237      $987

Total             $1920     $1137     $3057

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