Book Image

Gnucash 2.4 Small Business Accounting: Beginner's Guide

4 (1)
Book Image

Gnucash 2.4 Small Business Accounting: Beginner's Guide

4 (1)

Overview of this book

Attention, small business owners! Stop tax-day stress. Stop procrastinating with a shoebox full of receipts. Stop reinventing the wheel with a spreadsheet. Stop making decisions simply on a hunch. Stop wasting money on software that is overkill. Start by downloading GnuCash and getting your accounts in order. Designed to be easy to use, yet powerful and flexible, GnuCash allows you to track bank accounts, income, and expenses. As quick and intuitive to use as a checkbook register, it is based on professional accounting principles to ensure balanced books and accurate reports. You can do it and Gnucash 2.4 Small Business Accounting Beginner's Guide will help you get up and running with maintaining your accounts. Gnucash 2.4 Small Business Accounting Beginner's Guide speaks business language, not accountant-speak, because it is written by a former small business owner. It guides you to use GnuCash from scratch with step-by-step tutorials without jargon, pointing out the gotchas to avoid with lots of tips. It will teach you to work on routine business transactions while migrating transaction data from other applications gradually. You will be able to keep on top of transactions and run reports after reading just three chapters! Beyond Chapter 3, it is up to you how far you want to go. Reconcile with your bank and credit card statements. Charge and pay sales tax. Do invoicing. Track payments due. Set up reminders for bills. Avoid stress at tax time. Print checks. Capture expenses using your mobile phone. Gnucash 2.4 Small Business Accounting Beginner's Guide gives you the power. Know your numbers. Make decisions with confidence. Drive your business to its full potential.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Gnucash 2.4 Small Business Accounting
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


We learned a lot in this chapter about how to set up the accounts needed for a small business.

Specifically, we covered:

  • Installing GnuCash on a Windows PC: We walked through the steps involved in downloading and installing GnuCash on a PC running Windows 7, Vista, or XP.

  • Creating a set of accounts: We learned how to use the built-in template in GnuCash to quickly create a complete set of accounts needed for a typical small business.

  • Tweaking the set of accounts: While the preceding step helped us to make quick progress on setting up accounts, that was not enough. No two businesses are going to be exactly the same. There is always a need to tweak it further. We then looked at how to make account additions, changes, and deletions so that we can get it just right for your special business.

  • Entering an opening balance: We also learned how to enter an opening balance to the accounts, whether created from the template or separately, from scratch. We also reviewed different account types, parent accounts, top level accounts, and placeholder accounts.

  • Outputting the set of accounts to a spreadsheet: We also figured out how to ship the draft 'Chart of Accounts' to your accountants.

  • Strengths and limitations of GnuCash: We quickly reviewed the strengths and limitations of GnuCash as well.

Now that we've created the set of accounts, we have laid the necessary foundation. With that, we are ready to start entering transactions, which is the topic of the next chapter.