While my development platform has been well defined for some time even ignoring the recent problems with eclipse, other tools have lapsed or never even started. I've used Sage for accounting for a long time, but it has never been comfortable to use, so looking for something to manage bank accounts, both business and personal and is free rules it out anyway. I spent some time with Mistral yesterday working through a number of options and having first installed KMyMoney, I took it down and switched to gnucash when the question of the PayPal account came up. Then today looking into other areas, such as monitoring calories Mistral flagged it up again, however I don't think it was actually an 'intelligent' choice especially since we had started a new thread so the previous discussions had been lost. When digging into why it had listed it as the first choice it did not really explain, only that it is good with 'numerical lists'. One thing that DID come out which had been missed yesterday was that KMyMoney can potentially be used with Firebird via the Qt QIBASE SQL driver. So lots of pieces start coming together!

So wiping the slate clean again the current plan is to try and configure KMyMoney with my Firebird database as a start. The good thing about KMyMoney is that it is a proper KDE package and there is a good manual on the KDE site.

Now some will be wondering where calories comes into accounts, but the answer should be somewhat obvious when I explain the problem that I was working through. Taking advantage of 'centre isle' bargains at Lidl, a number of items I would like to include on the business accounts and hence reduce the tax bill. These were bought along with my food purchases and I have itemised receipts but adding them into gnucash has becoming complicated and the receipt has to be split across accounts, which then messes up the bank reconciliation. At least that is where we had got when I added in the idea of listing all the food items bought which I can then track as to what is left in the fridge/freezer and what calories I'd used while ticking off items used up. That Mistral came up with the idea that KMyMoney could be extended to do that makes sense and I have to assume that it was not simply triggered by remnants of the previous discussion thread. Some semblance of actual intelligence may actually be displayed.

So we get around to being able to add calorie and nutrition information to the list from the Lidl receipts. Made difficult of cause because they use much abbreviated descriptions and Lidl's own numeric codes rather than a real bar code. Currently I am manually adding these details to the Samsung Health App on my phone and tablet, and while there is an API to get at the data recorded by the app it does not surface the search engine for the products. myfitnesspal and openfoodfacts both offer to fill that hole, and this is another area I can now expand on going forward, along with perhaps simply reading the bar codes off the actual packets.