Buddi – Personal budget software for Ubuntu Desktop

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Buddi is a personal finance and budgeting program, aimed at those who have little or no financial background. In making this software, We have attempted to make things as simple as possible, while still retaining enough functions to satisfy most home users.

Buddi will run on almost any computer which has a Java virtual machine installed. This can include Windows, Macintosh OS X, Linux, and many other operating systems.

Install Buddi in Ubuntu

Preparing your system

sudo aptitude install odbcinst1debian1 unixodbc java-common sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jre

Now you need to download .deb package from here .Now you should be having Buddi-3.2.1.4.deb package.Install this package using the following command

sudo dpkg -i Buddi-3.2.1.4.deb

This will complete the buddi installation.

Using Buddi

If you want to open buddi go to Applications--->Office--->Buddi

Buddi is loading

Once it opens you should see similar to the following screen

Create Accounts

The first thing to do when you start Buddi for the first time is to create your accounts. In general, an account in Buddi is a location where you either store or owe money. The sum of the money in all accounts is your net worth. A few examples of accounts in Buddi may be your Savings account at the bank, your credit card, the money in your wallet, or an investment, like a GIC.

To create an account, make sure that you are in the My Accounts tab, and click on the Edit--->Create Account menu.

Enter the name, the type, and the starting balance. The name can be whatever you want, but must be unique -- you cannot have two accounts named "Money", for instance. The starting balance should be the amount which you currently have in this account: for instance, the total on your last bank statement, or the amount of money currently in your wallet.

Create Budget Categories

The next thing to do is to set up your budget. All money which comes in to or goes out of an account in Buddi is associated with a Budget Category. You can use these categories to categorize income and expenses, which can help you to track where you money is going.

On all new files, Buddi sets up some default budget categories, such as Salary, Groceries, Utilties, etc. If you do not feel that you will use some of these default ones, you can delete them. If you want to add more, you can do so by clicking Edit---> Create Budget Category.

Once you have set up your Budget Categories, you now need to decide how much to budget for each. This amount is the amount which you are planning to spend in one period (the most frequently used period is monthly, although you can change this for different categories). This amount forms the baseline for you, and helps you determine if you spent too much or not.

When you are first starting out at keeping a budget, it may be difficult to know how much to plan to spend. If you don't know, you can just make an estimate; you can always adjust this value at a later date.

The screenshot above shows the default Budget Categories, some of which have been assigned a budget value. Note that any which have not been assigned show up as a dashed line.

Buddi Preferences screen

Reports are how you can review your budget, and verify how well you kept to it. There are a few built in reports which are included with Buddi; in addition, you can download other plugins, written by third parties, which add additional reports. In this tutorial, we will only cover a few of the built in reports, but all of them will use the same basic methods.

When you first click on the "My Reports" section, you will see a list of possible reports, with a pulldown for each to select the time period which you wish to use. The details of what is shown in each report should be clear from the text. For instance, in the screenshor below, we are about to select the time period "This Month" for the Income Pie Graph report.

Buddi Version Details

Buddi Plugins

Using Plugins

Plugins are additions, mostly written by third parties, which can expand the functionality of Buddi. There are a number of different plugins types, including ones which import / export / synchronize your data with external programs, ones which add additional report types, etc.

To install a plugin, do the following:

Download it from the Buddi Plugin Downloads page.Unzip the file and extract the .buddi3plugin file. Make a note of which folder you extracted the file into. Open Buddi, and go to the Preferences screen, on the Plugins tab. Click the Add button Select the .buddi3plugin file which you extracted earlier
You should now see the plugin in the Plugins list. Hit OK to close the preferences screen and save your changes. You will be prompted to restart Buddi -- you must do this before the plugin is activated.

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