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 – using popular office software to query GnuCash data


We are going to do two things in this tutorial. First we are going to export the GnuCash data into a SQLite database. SQLite is a popular open source database that is being used behind the scenes in many well-known applications. It is possible that you already use SQLite, though you may not even be aware of that. As a prerequisite to the next step, get an ODBC driver for SQLite3 (http://www.ch-werner.de/sqliteodbc/) or a similar one and install it on your PC. This ODBC driver enables client applications such as OpenOffice.org Base to connect to databases such as SQLite3 as long as both support the ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) standard. After exporting the GnuCash data into SQLite3 database, we are going to use OpenOffice.org Base1 to connect to that exported database and run a query to extract specific data of interest to us.

  1. Select from the menu File | Save As…. The Save As… dialog will open. Click on the Data...