announcement beta release of piecash, an alternative python interface to GnuCash

[Sébastien de Menten]

Seen the recent emails on the gnucash mailing lists about several topics
for which the project I am working on could be deemed interesting, I
announce you that version 0.62 of piecash, an alternative python interface
to GnuCash, is released.

I made two simple screencasts to show its use (to be watched in 720p HD)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbyqRu1KZMo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q5zgJxWgd0
(as they show the ability to create and modify GnuCash file, their target
audience can be considered as "advanced user with python knowledge" or
whoever wanting to go this way).

Besides what is shown in the screencasts, piecash has also a basic QIF and
Ledger exporter.
Writing custom QIF or CSV importers is definitely something that can be
done. This was my primary need for piecash. I used successfully piecash to
import different information (accounts trees, transactions, ...) from
custom text files into GnuCash.

Regarding SQL reports, piecash is built on top of sqlalchemy. It is
therefore possible to use it to write queries in a backend agnostic way,
queries that sqlalchemy will properly translate to the proper dialect.
piecash has been essentially tested with sqlite and also, but moderately,
with PostgreSQL.

For document generation (reports, invoices, ...), piecash can be used with
a templating language (e.g. jinja2) to customise latex templates. It can
also be used in conjunction with other python packages to create PDFs.

Finally, piecash is simple to install (on windows and on linux) as it is a
pure python package. It is not tied to a GnuCash binaries/libraries (in
fact, it can run without GnuCash being installed at all) and so do not need
to be updated at each release of GnuCash.

As piecash is not part of the GnuCash project, discussing piecash related
email in the GnuCash mailing list is not appropriate (this email being an
exception ;-) ).
If you have piecash specific questions or want to discuss on the project, I
would kindly suggest you to use the google group/forum I set up at
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/piecash

kr

Sebastien

ps: as with any other software that uses your data files, please always
backup your files before using piecash