If It is Not in Your Books, It Didn't Happen!

Most small business people find accounting a chore. Delivering a shoe box full of receipts to your accountant at tax time is both expensive and ineffective. It is expensive because your accountant will charge you for all the time spent in unraveling the expenses and entering the data. It is ineffective because you won't have any data and reports about how your business is doing on a month-to-month or a quarter-to-quarter basis. In the meantime, you will be running your business by the seat of your pants. So, we are all agreed that it is good for your business to maintain accounts and be able to run monthly and quarterly reports! However, it is easier said than done.

Manual Accounting Wastes Time

One option is using a spreadsheet to keep track of all expenses and revenues as well as use your checkbooks, bank statements and credit card statements to reconcile these. This is certainly better than the shoebox, but still expensive of your accountant's time. But, reconciling and creating reports is going to take a lot of your time – time better spent running your business.

Commercial Accounting Software is Expensive

The other option is to buy a commercial accounting software. Some of them appear to be inexpensive, even free, at first. Then the costs add up – if you want to download bank transactions you need to buy the premium version, if you want to do custom invoicing you need to buy an add-on, and if you wan to print checks, you have to order the checks from the same vendor and so on. You won't know the full extent of what you signed up for until you are so deep that you won't have the option of pulling out. Feels like the Hobson's choice, right? Well, don't lose heart. Free open source software is here to provide you with some options.

Consider Free Open Source Accounting Software

You are looking for small business accounting or bookkeeping software that should be able to handle Expense Tracking, Billing, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Inventory Management, and so on.

GnuCash for small business accounting

Take a look at GnuCash, if you want to do your personal accounts combined with your business accounts or just business accounting for a small business.

You can download GnuCash free from here.

Check out my book Gnucash 2.4 Small Business Accounting: Beginner's Guide.

My article on Using Your Mobile Phone to Enter Data in GnuCash.

Read Precautions FAQ

Please read our Precautions FAQ before downloading.