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 – connecting from Excel to create reports and charts


You are going to create your Monthly Expenses report and also display it as a chart. This will give you the flexibility to extend reporting and charting capability beyond what is available in the canned GnuCash reports.

  1. Prerequisites: Make sure that you have saved your MACS accounts as a SQLite3 database from GnuCash.

  2. Prerequisites: Make sure that you have Microsoft Office Excel installed on your system. This tutorial and the screenshots are based on Excel 2003 running on Windows XP. If you have a different version or another operating system, then please look for the equivalent steps.

  3. Prerequisites: In order to connect to this SQLite3 database from Excel, you need an ODBC driver. Make sure you have installed an ODBC driver for SQLite3 and created an ODBC DSN to the exported GnuCash accounts file.

  4. While you are in a new worksheet in Excel, from the menu, select Data | Import External Data | New Database Query…. The Choose Data...