Brinance is a light weight command line financial planning and tracking program, written for UNIX in Perl (and C++ for the old version), hoping to be a functional replacement for something like GnuCash that is overly complicated for these simple tasks, and for those who prefer the command line. It's a simple UNIX personal finance program for the command line junkie.

This is a personal project of mine, and has thus evolved a bit since its inception. I originally wrote it C++. It was good enough for most of what I wanted to do, at first. I still have the design I put together for that first version. Soon, though, I wanted to be able to manage multiple accounts and have the ability post transactions in the future (i.e. I get paid the same amount on the 15th and 30th of each month, so I'll post them now and have the program apply them at the right time.). So 2.x was born, in Perl this time, and I called the C++ version 1.x. 1.x is stable and works, but is limited in features.

I have since written a semi-new 3.x, which separates the code into interface and the back-end. The back-end is a module, while the interface is a command line perl script that calls the module to do the work. This way, another interface could be written and access the same data. If you like the file format, but don't like the command line, you could write your own interface. Someone actually did write their own tk interface, which is relayed on the 3.x page.

Thus is the saga of brinance.

All versions of brinance are licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL 2.0.

Version 1 - C++

Version 2 - Perl

Version 3 - Perl with module (old reliable)

Version 4 - Perl with module, improved! (new stable)

Tips: Here are some tips for getting some information out of the brinance v1.1-3.x account files. Three cheers for UNIX text processing!