My first attempt at brinance was in C++, and I put together a design document first, so take a gander there to see what I was going for. Even in the newer versions, the design still pretty much stands, as it mostly deals with the command-line interface and the file format. The file format is really the bread and butter of brinance.
At my brother's request, I added the feature of an interactive menu to this version. I didn't implement that feature in the Perl versions, since that's not how I wanted to use the program. So, in addition to the features listed in the design, we now have an interactive menu system, too, if you don't give the program any command-line arguments. Good fun. Unfortunately, the files it deals with are hard-coded, but set up properly when you make install the program. By default, it throws it all in your user's bin and .brinance directories. Cheers!
It's bare-bones, but all that I want, and it works pretty flawlessly for me. I now use this instead of GNUCash. Thank you very much...
Download the old version (C++)
brinance-1.0.tar.gz - old release, curiosity's sake only.. Download from the 3.x series.
brinance-1.1.tar.gz - slightly newer.. This version writes the account file with the date style of 2.x and later versions (12 digit date).