What is the best cross-platform GPL personal finance tool available?
There isn't one. I haven't been very happy with anything I've tried, commercial or open source. I've used Quicken for a while and been fairly happy with the user experience, but I hate the idea of their sunset policy (forced upgrades) and using proprietary format for the data files. Note that I wouldn't mind using proprietary and/or commercial software if it used a format that allowed me to easily migrate to another application. And no, QIF/OFX/CSV doesn't count. What I've found works well for me is to use Mint.com for pulling transactions from my accounts and categorizing them. I then export the transaction history as a CSV file and convert it to QIF/OFX using csv2ofx, and then import the resulting file into GNUCash. The hardest part is using categories (Mint.com) and accounts (GnuCash) properly. Not perfect by any means, but certainly better than manually exporting transactions from each account. "I use ""Money Manager Ex"" which is a Windows application I use on PC to log my transactions and for simple statistic. They have two versions, simple standlone application and self-hosted web app."
"Here are a handful of measures I take myself: I check my credit reports once in a while and look for anything out of the ordinary. If somebody calls me on the telephone claiming to be from my bank or credit card company, utility, etc. I ask for their number, check it, and call them back.  I don't give personal information to people merely claiming to be from a place I do business with. I never fill out ballots for free contests.  Most of the time these are scams.  When I get a call telling me ""you won a free cruise"" for a ballot I supposedly filled out at the mall, I say they're lying through their teeth.  For excitement, I'll sometimes buy a lotto ticket instead. I'm careful when I surf the web.  I don't give my personal information to web sites I can't trust.  If they look the least bit shady, I'm out.  Also, I use different passwords at different web sites.  I avoid using a password from a public terminal, but when I must, I change my password soon after. I'm careful when I download software.  I don't install anything I didn't get from a trusted source.  I pay for software when necessary, so finding a trusted source is not hard.  But, I've heard of people who – to save a buck – would download a pirated application from a shady warez site only to be ""gifted"" a trojan horse key logging or other spyware along with it. When I no longer need a bill, receipt, statement, etc. or any document containing personal information, I shred it, and I use a shredder that does a micro-cut, not just a strip- or cross-cut.  The micro-cut remains go in the green bin with wet and yucky organic waste. When I no longer need a hard drive, I use a secure wiping tool like Darik's Boot & Nuke before reusing.  If the drive isn't worth reusing, I'll wipe first then take apart with my Torx screwdriver.  Once I have the drive platter, I scratch the heck out of it.  Remains go to the community recycling depot. That's all I can think of right now; I probably missed a few :-) So, what do others do?  I'm curious, too." We are mostly .NET C#. I'm not trying to sound like a big shot but generally, to work in finance as a software engineer, you have to be good at what you do. More specifically, I work on developing the inside tools for our traders and mutual/hedge fund managers to manage the business. I work on benchmark, asset, and valuation analysis tools. Technologies I use on a daily basis are C#, SQL, JavaScript, JQuery, MVVM (and other design patterns), HTML5, and more specialized unit testing tools. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask or pm. Hey, no worries at all. Like any business practice there are proper uses and abuses. First and foremost, companies should engage in allocation of capital that best serves their uses given prospects of 'returns' in a broad sense (this could very well include employee remuneration). After that, all excess funds should be distributed (through buybacks or dividends).   There is without a doubt overincentivizing going on (i.e. buybacks preceding prudent capex or other investments) to boost C-suite pay. In other cases it is actually used to hide declining performance altogether (declining earnings compensated by decreasing outstanding shares). This is simply poor management using these tools. They would have most likely used others were these not made available to them (e.g underpaying/understaffing).   It's an investors job to allocate capital that rewards good management practice. The problem is that this is an ideal made harder by obfuscation on the part of management, lack of governance and even the rise of passive management among others.   I'm in private equity myself (with a strong focus on prudence and longevity of companies), so these are considerations that go without saying. I'm sometimes quite astonished what public companies get away with, but you can't blame tools for being used poorly or being available. "If the cheque is crossed (as almost all are these days), it can only be paid into an account in the name of the person it was written out to: it cannot be paid into another's account, nor can it be ""cashed""1 – see the rules on ""Crossed"" cheques. Note: that while the recipient of the cheque cannot (legally) alter this state of afairs, the writer of a cheque that was printed pre-crossed can – at least technically – cancel the crossing (see above link). Probably the best the OP can do is pay in the cheque on the friend's behalf (as described in Ben Millwood's answer) and then either lend the friend some money until they are mobile and can get some cash to repay the OP (or have the friend write one of their own cheques which the OP can pay into their bank account). 1 As mentioned in the last section of the rules on crossed cheques, the only exception is that designated ""Cheque cashing shops"" have special arrangements to deposit cheques which they have cashed (after deducting a fee). However, they would (should?) require proof of identity (of the original payee) and so are unlikely to be of any help (and probably not worth the cost for £35).  Having said that, I've never used one, so have no idea how strict they are in practice." Money Dashboard and Love Money look like two best options out there now that Kublax closed their doors. Mint were making noises last year about spreading to UK/Canada, but I've not heard anything new about that. "The Yahoo Finance API is no longer available, so Finance::Quote needs to point at something else.  Recent versions of Finance::Quote can use AlphaVantage as a replacement for the Yahoo Finance API, but individual users need to acquire and input an AlphaVantage API key. Pretty decent documentation for how to this is available at the GnuCash wiki. Once you've followed the directions on the wiki and set the API key, you still need to tell each individual security to use AlphaVantage rather than Yahoo Finance: As a warning, I've been having intermittent trouble with AlphaVantage.  From the GnuCash wiki:  Be patient. Alphavantage does not have the resources that Yahoo! did and it is common for quote requests to time out, which GnuCash will present as ""unknown error"". I've certainly been experiencing those errors, though not always." Out Of The Dark OOTD is a budgeting and personal money management web app that does not require you to give out access to your bank accounts or even your personal identity.  It's a great tool for people with no financial experience with features like Cash Put-Aside and the Credit Card Debt Terminator and it has tons of instant guides explaining how to use every feature.  You can check it out at myootd.org. A desktop application that has the same features (although as already stated, nothing will be identical but if you are looking for functionality then certainly there will be) and pretty simple to use was Microsoft Money, however, Microsoft stopped supporting it with newer versions and while the existing versions will work, I still use mine, there will be no future updates. I like the interface, its simple to use and has all the features you want. They abandoned it in favor of Intuit's Quicken but personally I am not a fan of the Quicken interface. They still had a more extensive and probably too much for the average user application called Office Accounting, but they abandoned future updates and supports on that in favor of Intuit's Quickbooks. Again, I am not a fan of the interface but they are very feature rich including invoicing and payroll, again overkill for the average user. They still have the Small Business Accounting in the form of Microsoft Dynamics, but that is utterly overkill for personal use. I generally don't trust online or cloud based accounting solutions like Mint or even Quicken online because I don't trust my information security to some third party without knowing how they are securing it and what will happen to me if/when they are leaked due to breach. So I like to keep everything local to myself and that's a good move for you, you should do that. It seems at the moment the market standard without much competition is Quicken for personal use and Quickbooks for small business. I would recommend you start with Quicken and if your needs increase in the future, you can easily transfer into Quickbooks to scale up as they are fully compatible with each other. Check it out here and compare their products to see what works best for your needs.