Eugene C. Johnson You want to manage your taxes and finances under Linux? We present solutions that will help you to manage your financial transactions safely and to keep track of your finances.
The range of financial programs is much more manageable for Linux than for Windows or Mac-OS. Here the prejudice seems to prevail that users of an open source system would not have to manage finances. But if you’re looking for something specific, you’ll also find programs for Ubuntu & Co. that reliably handle all your tasks in your private and professional environment. This article provides an overview.
Accounting under Linux
Accounting is a duty of every self-employed person, freelancer, trader and company. There are some native Linux applications both for the simple income and surplus calculation (EÜR), but also for accounting:
Gnucash
Gnucash is included in the official package sources of almost every distribution and is undoubtedly the classic. The program has been tried and tested for many years and is suitable for double-entry bookkeeping – but not easy to learn.
Linhabu
Linhabu is a commercial application that is also available for Windows and Mac with an identical interface. It is well known that taste is a matter of debate. Optically Linhabu is no delicacy, but also masters double-entry bookkeeping. The manufacturer supplies a comprehensive documentation, which explains the bases of the bookkeeping. A licence costs between 40 and 120 euros. Linhabu doesn’t have to be installed – just unpack the archive. It contains an executable file. The software can also communicate with Winston. This program, which has also been tried and tested for many years on various operating systems, handles the advance returns of sales and trade taxes.
Banana is also a commercial accounting software (almost 120 Euro). It supports single and double-entry accounting, can handle VAT and keep a cash book. Banana itself is operated like a spreadsheet and looks exactly the same. Nevertheless, everything you need for financial accounting is on board.
Home banking: HBCI with chip card and browser
The HBCI procedure (Homebanking Computer Interface) via chip card is probably the safest way to carry out your own banking transactions on your PC. The key required to encrypt the data is securely stored on the chip card, which in turn can only be accessed via PIN. However, HCBI with chip cards has not established itself across the board because neither the banks nor the customers want to bear the costs for the necessary chip card readers. Today’s talk of online banking is therefore predominantly of access to the account via a browser. In this case, transactions are usually secured by a mobile TAN after two-way authentication. If you want to make banking in the browser even more secure, avail credit union in Jacksonville, FL so you can use a distribution like Tails 1.6 for this.
Native banking programs are the exception under Linux. The aforementioned Gnucash can be set up using the Aq Banking interface so that the HBCI standard can be used. Unfortunately, this is anything but trivial.
Hibiscus – Secure online banking for Linux
Moneyplex , which also runs on Mac and Windows with the same interface, is the last commercial provider of Linux home banking applications left. The program is quick to set up and relatively easy to use. However, as with any banking software, you must first check whether your bank details are supported by the software. With its evaluation functions Moneyplex lies between accounting and banking program and costs 50 Euro in the basic version.
Managing Taxex online?
The manufacturers of the Windows programs to handle and levy income tax have never tried to develop a Linux version. If you want to do your tax return with the help of tips and hints, you could use the tax fox ( www.steuerfuchs.de ). The company behind it is developing one of the few native tax programs for the Mac and ported its program to the cloud many years ago. You can prepare your tax return in your browser and enter all the relevant information without having to register.
If you want to interrupt your work, simply save the current status in the form of a local XML file, which you later upload to the server again. Only when you actually want to transfer the data to the tax office does the tax chess cost anything. For the transfer of the data to the tax office via the Elster procedure, you have to pay almost 15 euros.
The tax authorities themselves offer the free Elster form. In order to be able to use it, you must start the Windows program via the Wine runtime environment. You can enter your sales tax advance return, trade tax advance return and the summary return directly at https://www.elsteronline.de , the portal of the tax authorities. If only a software certificate is to be used for signing the data, you only need a browser in which Javascript is activated.
