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

GnuCash currently supports only US business types for income tax


The GnuCash income tax module that we will see in this chapter covers only the following US business types:

  • Individuals who file US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form 1040 for Profit and Loss from Business

  • Partnerships who file US IRS Form 1065

  • Corporations who file US IRS Form 1120

  • S Corporations who file US IRS Form 1120S

From these, we will be using the example of individuals who file Form 1040. This form will typically be used by self-employed persons as well as sole proprietors of businesses. Within this Form 1040, the specific section that we will cover in more detail is Schedule C. Schedule C covers the income of the business for the tax year and deductible expenses as well as the resulting net profit or loss of the business.

Note

At present, only US business types are supported in GnuCash. For other countries, you can export the numbers to a spreadsheet and aggregate the numbers to match the tax categories and line items...