I recently had to compile a short guide for getting started with
GNU Pem for Nanonote users,
and thought this might be beneficial for the project's page.
GNU Pem is a console personal expenses manager. It uses brief
commands to document transactions in comma separated files, which are
stored in a calendar directory tree inside the ~/.pem folder. Each month
is stored in a separate file, and months from the same year are stored in
their own folder. A typical file will be named
for July 2011, and will look something like this:
1309723909,candy,10.00,0.00,
if you spent 10 dollars on candy. The developer does not advise
editing these files manually, but using Pem to interact with them. They
can be later easily imported into spreadsheet software like
OpenOffice.org's Calc or KDE's KSpread.
Because Pem relies on the system clock to save the time of the
transaction, setting your clock before using Pem is necessary.
To Begin using Pem, simply start documenting transactions from the
console, by invoking pem with a description and amount like this:
Both description and amount are mandatory, and if you specify an
amount first it would be interpreted as a description. You can track
earnings by specifying the -e option, like this:
Finally, you can generate reports, the easiest of which is the daily
report which can be generated with the -s option, like this:
Pem's other options are available through the --help option.
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- Ernest Kugel