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.

The small business accounting software market is in transition

Microsoft Office Accounting was discontinued effective Nov 2009. In December 2009, market leader Intuit sunset Quicken Online in 2010 in favor of their online personal financial management service, mint.com. However, the migration path for small businesses using Quicken Home and Office is not clear. With the result, the very small businesses are being left high and dry. Either you can rediscover the wheel using spreadsheets or invest significant money and effort in commercial accounting software that is overkill for your size.

Free and open source GnuCash steps into the spotlight

GnuCash has features to handle both personal as well as small business accounting. First written in 1997, it was available to Unix and Linux users for several years. In 2005 a Mac version became available and then a Windows version in July 2007. It has a significant user base among the early adopters. The current version, 2.4, runs on Windows 7, Vista and XP as well as on Mac and Linux. While much of it is documented, users have to spend a lot of time and effort to search through the help docs, wiki, the mailing list and third-party sources to get answers.