Gnucash 2.4 Small Business Accounting: Beginner's Guide

You were wondering what happened to this blog, and this site, for a little more than a year. Here is my excuse (valid, I hope). As you know, I have been advocating the use of open source software by small businesses. There is no dearth of feature rich, stable and actively developed software that can be used by small businesses. But when I got closer to helping small businesses use them, I discovered this yawning gap. While the open source community is churning out good software, the availability of documentation leaves much to be desired. As a result, from the point of view of most small business users, open source software is like a well kept secret.

I decided to roll up my sleeves and do something about it

The result of my effort for nearly a year is the just published Gnucash 2.4 Small Business Accounting: Beginner's Guide. You should see a link there to download a sample chapter. Check it out. If you get the book, I will appreciate it if you can write a review on the book seller's site. Any insight you can provide on what you liked will help others. Any criticism will help me improve.

Go By Your Gut But Validate With Facts And Figures

"Trust, but verify"

This is a quote from Horatio Caine (played by David Caruso) in the popular CBS series CSI Miami. It was also the signature phrase of President Ronald Reagan when discussing relations with the Soviet Union. As SMB owners, many of you tend to rely on gut feelings to make some important decisions. A less charitable way of looking at it is that you are making those decisions based on emotional feelings such as ego, insecurity, fear and greed. Some of those decisions can make or break a small business such as yours. It is prudent to challenge those decisions by collecting more data and doing objective analysis.

Decisions, decisions

Let us take an example. If you need to make decisions about where and how to spend your scarce advertising dollars, you know it is a huge gamble. However, especially if you are doing business online, you are already collecting a ton of data - the number of visitors to your site, the number that converted to leads and the number that actually bought something and so on. In addition, you also have access to demographic and other data - income, age, geographical data - freely downloadable from the government web sites. You need to be able to analyze your data, cross referencing it with the demographic data, to get actionable insight into who is your target market and where it makes most sense to put those bets. In short you need -- drum roll please -- business intelligence!

Small Businesses Ride The Open Source Tailwind To High Profitability

Commercial open source vendors are reporting spectacular growth in a year when everyone else is offering excuses about the economic downturn. So, how does it matter to you as a small medium business?

A well known quote from investment guru Warren Buffett is "One of the lessons your management has learned - and, unfortunately, sometimes re-learned - is the importance of being in businesses where tailwinds prevail rather than headwinds." As a small business, you want to take advantage of the tailwind, whenever you can, so that you sail faster towards your goals.

xTuple ERP Doubles Customer And Partner Base

Norfolk, VA based xTuple is a vendor of Business Suites, also known as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. They took a big gamble and released the source code for their community edition, PostBooks, in July 2007. They license the Standard and Manufacturing editions with additional features and support. xTuple announced a very successful 2009 despite tough market conditions. They doubled their customer base by gaining over 100 new commercial customers and doubled their partner base as well. The free open source PostBooks edition has been downloaded over 320,000 times and they have seen a dramatic acceleration of their global user community to over 20,000 active members. This is the prospect pool from which their future paid support customers will emerge.

Small Businesses Can Spot Rough Diamonds In Open Source Software

Wyoming State Geological Survey published a report in 2004 titled Searching For Placer Diamonds by W. Dan Hausel. It says, I quote from the report here: "Even so, many diamonds would still have gone unrecognized because most people didn't know how to identify diamonds. By becoming familiar with the characteristics of rough diamonds, a prospector will be better prepared to find these elusive gemstones." 

You are a business person. As an SMB, you can judge value when you study something...even if the value is not obvious, right? How about something like a rough diamond? You are not going to ignore a rough diamond that is readily available to you, just because it doesn't have the sparkle, just because it is not presented in a nice jewelry case with spotlights, just because there are not any sales people trying to make a hard sale to you, right?

Open Source Software Is Like Rough Diamonds

Open source software is out there, available free for you to take. But, it is not cut and polished and there are no showrooms and no sales people presenting it in the most attractive way to pull in customers.