Family Accountant

Family Accountant is a multi-user, group-oriented multi-platform client-server and/or standalone financial management program.

Description
One feature that I have not seen other personal financial management applications provide is real multi-user support suitable for families (or for groups). For example, you might want to open a savings account for your child, and have them track the account using the financial management software. You (probably) do not want the child to have access to your accounts, but it would be convenient to have their's visible along with all of yours. This kind of thing will be easy to do via a role based user/group permissions system.

Front-ends will be built for Linux, MacOS X, Solaris, Windows & PalmOS. As I do not (yet) own a Macintosh, I would love to have a couple of developers with Macs join the team.

This will be a multi-user, local database application with a central storage server capability.

Development Plan
The development plan is to first build the application to work with the local database (only MySQL will be supported at this stage).

Next, the Family Accountant Server will be built and the client will gain the ability to synchronize and manage the server piece. The Server will initially support MySQL, PostgreSQL and IBM DB2 for the data storage (support for Oracle, MSSQL & others may come later).

For stand-alone installations, the database could be on a local MySQL server, embedded MySQL or SQLite.

2008/01/30 -- by Peregrine
(Note: Since 2007/08, I have taught classes every week, except for Thanksgiving, until Christmas, including 9 out of 10 weeks in a row on the road. As such, I just didn't feel up to working on OpenBrainstem projects. I left that job at Christmas (2007) and will now be able to spend time a little more regularly on OpenBrainstem.)

The first database has been created, but I still need to add the foreign key constraints. I believe a little further refinement is possible. It looks like a couple of triggers might be warrented, as well, but I will look into that more at a later point in the development.

The next step, to build the first code, has begun. I'm working in Qt to build the client that can work directly with the local database.

Neither the database.sql file nor any of my initial code have been checked in, yet. See OpenBrainstem:Infrastructure for more information.

2007/08/16 -- by Peregrine
Application engineering has recently begun. The database design is nearly finished. I have started building some of the logic flow-charts. I plan to post the database diagram (in PDF) soon and will put up flow-charts shortly thereafter. Next, I'll start writing all of the user manual then follow that with the complete API manual.