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

Time for action – setting the starting invoice number


We want the next invoice to start with the number 2501. We are going to directly edit the file where GnuCash saves all the accounts data in order to achieve this objective:

  1. From the menu select Edit | Preferences | General.

  2. In the Files pane, you will see the Compress files checkbox. Uncheck it as shown in the following screenshot:

  3. Exit GnuCash using the File | Quit menu.

  4. Most important step: Make a backup of your accounts file.

  5. Use a plain text editor such as Notepad and open the GnuCash accounts file.

    Note

    Word processing programs such as OpenOffice Writer or MS Word are not suitable for this work. They store formatting data, in addition to the text. This messes up the GnuCash data file.

  6. Search for the text gncInvoice. You should find it near the top of the file. You will see the corresponding value in the very next line. Change the number to 2500 as shown in the following screenshot:

  7. Save and close the text editor.

  8. Start GnuCash again and confirm...