Our Review:

If you are looking for a quick education in double entry accounting, look no further than GnuCash. It will ease you into the "Assets = Liabilities + Equity" accounting equation and help you keep tabs of your budget without using the categories commonly used in commercial personal finance applications.

Users' are allowed to easily create as many accounts as they need under each category. The program is integrated with a reporting and graphing module to generate a full suite of standard and customizable reports including balance sheet, profit & loss, portfolio valuation, etc. It also allows for convenient printing of checks.

On the downside it does not track stock price movements automatically and some brokers only support online downloads of files compatible with Microsoft Money or Quicken so that users' have to update them manually. The program does not provide encryption of files but users' can rely on third party encryption software to keep files confidential and secured if necessary. It also takes a while to either start-up or close down the program.