I had neglected balancing my cheque book for quite some time, so it was no great surprise to see that things were pretty messed up when I attempted to do so recently. It took a marathon session with OpenOffice Calc (that's the OSS equivalent of MS Excel for the uninitiated) and poring over my barely legible cheque book entries from more than a year ago (yes, that's how long it's been since things were fine) for me to get things back on track again.

Flush with the above accounting success, I downloaded and installed Gnucash. After some twiddling around and reading sections of the online help, I have set things up the way I want them. If I continue making entries in Gnucash religiously for the rest of the year, I will know exactly how much I spent on coffee this fiscal...