If like me you are useless with figures and you have little or no financial background, then Buddi is a breath of fresh air.
It's aimed at making accounting as simple as possible by cutting out the jargon and complexities and making the process accessible to people from all walks of life. Best of all, it's completely free and open to modification as it's completely open source. It also works across platforms because it's based completely on Java. Obviously, if you're dealing with sensitive financial data then one major concern is security. The god news is that Buddi allows you to encrypt your accounting sheets but the bad news is that if you lose your password, there's no way of recovering it because there are no backdoors to the encryption according to the developer. While the graphics and interface are not exactly spectacular, the program does present everything very simply and in an easy to interpret way. It also allows you to export data although the number of formats it can do this in are pretty limited. There have also been reports by some users that sometimes, files become "corrupted" or inaccessible although the developer.
For anyone who doesn't want to splash-out on expensive accounting software or are plain scared of accounting, this is a great program.
